I know, but ruby brings a bad taste to my mouth. Its core platform is built off the ruby platform, and ruby, like any other fan of any other agile language, has a preference. I have had bad experiences with ruby. The community is what did it for me.
Already deployed it.. creating many recipes. Haven't gotten to directadmin... yet and suspect I will break it up into may small pieces. Already have things like clamav updates working... Just create a local yum repo and done. Updated in 1/2 hour on all servers. Obviously with this kinda of automation you must develop and test somewhere first. Or you can have all servers broken in a 1/2 hour.
We've setup clamav to our specs and all servers now match it (ie having freshclam update hourly instead of daily) Since we add features on top of DirectAdmin I may be replacing some of DA's script installs with Puppet instead and make it to our liking.
Another system I have used that I preferred greatly over puppet is capistrano. It was much easier to deploy new servers. VMWare, Storagetek, and capistrano.