i did something like that at my last job - the cluster manager was designed as a set of command line tools, and every program had a -j flag that would make it p

i did something like that at my last job - the cluster manager was designed as a set of command line tools, and every program had a -j flag that would make it parse stdin as json and write json to stdout. we then wrote wrappers around all the linux utilities we were using, to enable the same behaviour. once the basic system was in place it let us experiment with new features very rapidly indeed because everything could be tested in isolation from the command line using automated test scripts. what was especially nice was that we could use the same test framework to chain several utilities together and test the combination, because it was all a black box with json going in and coming out.