I recently came across a piece of software called “Fabric”. It has been made in python and its purpose is to help simplifying the process of deploying software to remote machines.
The really cool thing I like about it is that it’s much faster than, say, an ant script because it actually reuses the SSH connections it opens. This means that, if you copy a file to a remote host (using the ‘put’ operation), do some local copying, and after that perform a remote command (like starting a server, for instance), this latter operation will not need to open another SSH connection to run the command.
I managed to cut by a factor of 5 the deployment speed of some java services running on jboss just by replacing ant’s sshexec by fabric’s ‘put’ method and its siblings 
But there’s a lot more to it: It allows you to configure multiple target environments and hosts (think about deployment to multiple nodes of equal functionality), perform remote commands with ‘sudo’ and, since the configuration file is basically a python script, you can use all the pythonic sugar of your liking 
More information about Fabric can be found here. You can get the latest (stable) version in their github page, and here is a reference of the available operations.
UPDATE: I didn’t notice, but someone posted an article on YCombinator news about exactly the same subject before I did. I really should read the list before posting
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