Goadmin is a suite of tools intended to (eventually, if I don't get tired of it first) serve as an alternative to puppet, but without the cross-platform capabilities.
The basic idea is that you write a program in go that you would like to have periodically run on your system. Goadmin will provide libraries to help you write this program.
The tricky part is how to easily distribute this program to all the
machines that you administer. The approach that goadmin takes is to
modify your admin program to embed a key into it, along with code to
fetch and decrypt (using said key) an updated binary. So you just
need to put /path/to/myadmin --update, and your program will be run
periodically, and updated when a change is made.
Your admin program consists of one or more files that define variables
that are initialized using deps.Run, which determine what needs to
be done. You compile it with
goupdate --source=URL_WHERE_YOU_PUT_ENCRYPTED_BINARIES your-admin-code.go otherfile.go
This will compile your code, and generate a key (called
your-admin-code.key), as well as a plain-text and encrypted binary.
Use scp to put the binary on the computer (or computers) to be
adminned. Then when you make a change, you just need to recompile
(using the same command line as above) to generate a new binary
encrypted with the same key. Put it at the URL specified, and when
you run
./your-admin-code --update
the program will grab the new version, replace itself, and exec it.
Goadmin uses symmetric encryption to ensure that only authorized clients can read the admin program, and an RSA signature to ensure that only the server can provide a valid admin program. Goadmin also adds a serial number to each executable, so they will only update with a later version, to get around replay attacks (e.g. where someone provides an old, possibly buggy version of an admin executable).
Puppet is nice, but it is simultaneously too powerful and too weak for my uses. It's got all sorts of cross-platform features that I have no use for, and as a result, it doesn't work particularly well on Debian (and Debian-derived) systems. Also, puppet is an amazing resource hog.