The Puppet project allows you to issue system administration commands to one or more machines, and will smooth over the differences between distributions for you. For example, if you want to install MySQL, that action should be your primary aim, and you shouldn’t have to worry about if the machine is running Maemo, Ubuntu, or Fedora.
Puppet frees you from thinking about the hardware architecture a system is using, what Linux distribution it runs, or where that particular machine happens to store its Apache DocumentRoot by using a declarative language to specify the system administration task that you would like to perform. Puppet has many built-in facilities, such as classes, which allow the different details to be smoothed over when Puppet rolls out the system administration tasks you have declared.
Link: Linux