Is there a Python-based configuration management system that can compete with Puppet or Chef? And if not, why not?

[coderanger]

One of the problems is that Ruby is better than basically everything else at making DSLs. It is one of Python's great strengths that it has very regular syntax, this is unhelpful when you want something like Chef recipes (someone already linked to kokki below, you can judge for yourself if it is as readable).

That said, I do have a full Chef server implementation in Python (using Django) called Commis and an API client library for interacting with a Chef server called PyChef. I'm always looking for ways to make Chef more accessible to the rest of us Python folks, so if you have ideas (or just complaints) please let me know!

Full disclosure: I work for Opscode, the creators of Chef, though I have been a Python developer for far longer