For quite some time I have been looking at writing a simple management agent that is cross-platform, extensible and secure. My primary interest is that there are often times where I would like a means of performing some task on a remote system, without the necessity of actually connecting to those systems. My thinking on this little project really got ratcheted into high-gear when I was studying for one of my recent certifications, wherein I was studying the architecture of an enterprise management platform.
For my part, I have the framework of the server in place, and will be fleshing-out the bits to transport and execute arbitrary plugins/modules and configurations. Once that's done, the sky is basically the limit.