For those looking for a dead simple alternative to Chef or Puppet, I wrote Shoestrap. It's a pure Bash, no-BS set of scripts. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Chef, but it might be enough for your needs.
I too wrote my own system - which uses Perl. Mine is called Slaughter and the upcoming 2.x release allows you to fetch policies/instructions from remote servers via one of:
* rsync
* http
* git clone
* hg clone
etc. It is pretty extensible and covers my needs. Beyond that it is a little hard to know.
https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap
https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap-example