Informative response. Thank you for this. Perhaps my time has been well spent mastering the shell at the expense of not learning Ruby and Puppet. I have a ne

Informative response. Thank you for this. Perhaps my time has been well spent mastering the shell at the expense of not learning Ruby and Puppet. I have a need for keeping things small (too small for Ruby) so if I do need to use scripting languages other than sh for configuration, I'm planning to use Lua. Here's a question for you since you mentioned Vagrant: I'm interested in hosting that allows me to run my preferred bootloader that reliably boots my DomU kernels instead of the PyGrub hack that AWS uses. I can deploy my systems as Xen kernels, as filesystem images that have a Dom0 that can run my DomU kernels, whatever. I can also run limited purpose kernels in userspace so I am not necessarily restricted to Xen as a means of "virtualization". I want the AWS convenience of creating and launching an instance remotely rather than having to visit a datacenter. But I do not want anything to do with grub. All my configuration is in the DomU kernel's embedded filesystem. When I change configs I simply edit the kernel source and recompile. My kernels recompile very quickly. I don't use kernels provided by third parties. I'll probably have to build my own "cloud" to get things the way I want. Big itch; relentless scratching. Easy? No. But, so often that's how useful software comes into existance: because of someone personally finds the status quo inadequate.