Fabric
Fabric is a network-aware build tool. Think of it like make (or rake, or pake, etc.) for remote servers. With Fabric, it is just as easy to script a remote environment as it is to script a local one. In fact, with Fabric, you can do both.
Fabric can actually be used to automate installing a server in the cloud. In this article, I show how to use Fabric with the hpcloud UNIX client to create an HP Cloud server instance and then configure it as a LAMP server.
While I show this with HP Cloud, the technique could readily be adapted to other cloud providers like OpenStack or AWS.
Updated: Fixed indenting that was breaking Python. Thanks to aeronotix.
