So how about this… Let’s have a way to run a piece of configuration, let’s called it a “script” against one or more machines over SSH. That configuration is specified in a single YAML file across the set of machines. If you want to apply more than one piece of config ro more than one set of machines, you invoke the tool multiple times. The configuration is then a simple list of “items” of the form:

• name: name of the item
  
• check: a snippet of shell to determine the state of the item.
  
• action: a snippet of shell to execute if the item’s check fails.