I found out about Fabric via Armin Ronacher's article Deploying Python Web Applications. Fabric is a Capistrano inspired deployment tool for the Python community. It is very simple to use. There are 4 main commands: local is almost like os.system because it runs a command on the local machine, run and sudo run a command on a remote machine as either a normal user or as root, and put transfers a file to a remote machine.

Here is a sample setup which displays information about the Apache processes on my remote EC2 instance.