iRules within the F5 BigIP products are written in Tcl. I spent a lot of time over the last 15-20 years writing/managing iRules and I always quite enjoyed it. Don't have much recent exposure over the last few years, though.

You both should take a look at Salt Cloud. Since you are already working with Python Jake it may be worth looking into. The project is doing a lot of the same things and it has the advantage of bootstrapping with Salt.

I hack on salt-cloud, and found it to be a useful tool. And getting better every day... http://github.com/saltstack/salt-cloud

If you build a few map files using salt-cloud, you have a quick vagrant-ish setup that you can start/stop/destroy with ease. Super easy to have a whole test cluster boot up for quick test/dev work. Fyi, salt is really awesome for people looking for alternatives to chef/puppet: http://saltstack.org

I am personally less than enthusiastic when it comes to puppet-style solutions for their tendency to create configuration drift; running the same command in more than one place expecting the same results is in my view rarely the best solution in terms of maintainability and reliability.

I've actually already been experimenting with salt, seems like a decent option for a multi-node configuration setup.