Agreed. Ansible works, but it works so very slowly because it zips and transfers scripts/binaries over to the remote host without caching.

I hacked up a simple system, in golang, which uses and SSH connection to run commands and transfer files. Of course I simplified the problem to only really uploading files, running commands, and simple template expansion. For a lot of services where you just need to download a binary and configure a config-file it works well but it's nowhere near as useful as Ansible's module system:

https://github.com/skx/deployr/