Show HN: Synapse - Universal API for remote system administration
comodit.github.com
comodit.github.com
You don't have to know about yum, apt or whatever package manager your hosts use thanks to synapse-agent's abstraction layer.
This looks neat, but I don't see anything that says they have learned lessons from puppet, bcfg2 and cfengine.
As you mention, the approach is really similar to the abstraction in the Puppet DSL. But instead of using it to describe a recipe, you use it to remotely manage a host.
Obviously you need knowledge of the target system, but at least you can write orchestration scripts that are cross-platform and where the only data changing are package names, path, and content of files.
It's in fact much more similar to mcollective and salt, which both innovates from tools like cssh by using a messaging middleware instead of ssh to connect to the target hosts.
The examples make it look very similar, but written in python.