drist aims at being simple to understand and pluggable with standard tools. There is no special syntax to learn, no daemon to run, no agent, and it relies on base tools like awk, sed, ssh and rsync.

In this paper we have presented Charon, a tool for provision- ing and deployment of networks of machines from declarative specifications. It has several important properties, such as reproducibility, integration of provisioning and deployment, and abstraction over cloud backends. In future work, we intend to improve management of mutable state, e.g., to allow migration of machines between cloud backends or regions.