At our BoF, one member (who's name has escaped my L2 cache at the
moment) talked about creating a distributed system manager for web
services such as memcache, database shards, etc.
I mentioned that this reminded me of an existing java project,
assimilator.
http://assimilator.sourceforge.net/ It may be a
interesting conceptual start if you want to work on a distributed
system for more Linux type stuff using python.
Ryan