A long time ago I wanted an Ansible equivalent that worked by injecting a bootstrap VM, then sending configuration code to run on the remote node, rather than c

A long time ago I wanted an Ansible equivalent that worked by injecting a bootstrap VM, then sending configuration code to run on the remote node, rather than chatting back and forth over an SSH tunnel. A lot of the slowness of applying config was that chattiness, and it would have been a lot faster to avoid it. I have no idea if there is a tool that actually works like this - I remember an exploit tool that did something similar, but it wasn't quite right - but making that initial bootstrap VM and a useful stdlib an APE executable would also have avoided the "there needs to be a working Python at the other end" issue which persisted in tripping me up for far longer than it should have.