Summary
In the immortal words of that modern day philosopher Homer Jay Simpson: "Can't Someone Else Do It?"
If you're too lazy to configure your own servers: let Salt do it for you. Salt is an open source configuration management tool like Chef or Puppet but written in Python using ZeroMQ.
If you're too lazy to login to your servers to run commands: let Salt
do it for you. Salt is also a remote execution system. A single command
run from the "master" salt server can call tens, hundreds, or
thousands of remote servers.
And if you're too lazy to install both an OS and Salt itself: let Salt do it for you. Salt Cloud can spin up new boxes for you in the cloud, install Salt on them, and introduce them to the "master" salt server.
Salty vagrants, masters, minions, states, pillars, grains, salt clouds, parallel execution: I'll attempt to touch on them all in this talk.
You can also be expected to be "assaulted" with a barrage of terrible salt themed puns.