+1 for Salt. I really like it. I came to it not as a replacement of puppet or chef or other mature solutions but as a better "log in with ssh, run commands and dump some some config scripts" system. Ansible was another contender but Windows support in Salt won over (and Salt now also has ssh-only mode I hear).

Being a Pythonista and working with Chef for the last year I think that this is makes some sense. We've been recently contemplating the same migration.

Of course, this case the number of servers being managed is low enough that there isn't really a going to be much of a performance difference between Chef or Salt so this is likely just the preference of the current maintainers.

Their reason for using Salt (from the Distutils mailing list [1]):

"> Can you say a little about the choice to use Salt instead of Chef? I don't really care either way, but am just curious. Is it because Salt is written in Python, or were there other reasons (functionality, etc)?

"I’d need to ask Ernest to be sure, but I believe it was mostly that he was more familiar with it. The fact that it was written in Python was a bonus as well ;) I don’t think that there was anything that Chef was missing or that Salt had over Chef, just familiarity of the person who did most of the work. I’ll double check with Ernest to make sure there wasn’t another reason :)"

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2014-January...

I have actually now asked Ernest, and that was basically the reason. Familiarity. He did most of the work and was more familiar so it enabled him to complete the work quicker. We still do use Chef on the python.org infra, just not for PyPI itself.

They felt dirty using a ruby project.

Ansible would be another awesome python solution to use in this case.

as a solo developer doing my own devops, ansible has been fantastic for its near-zero infrastructure overhead.

Why you have the notion that they despite ruby?