What's the motivation for moving away from Ansible? Just wondering. Puppet and Chef are enormous and brittle in my experience. I've moved previously from Puppet to Chef, and then from Chef to Ansible. I tried Saltstack but it felt similar to Puppet and Chef. Ansible can be slow, but the complexity overhead is minimal comparatively.
You may also consider CFEngine. Each solution has its forces and weaknesses, what will you be using it for ?
I was asking just out of curiosity. I'm not really an Ansible user, but I was looking forward to learn it as part of my own devops education stuff.
Ideally, I would prefer a similar software written in a C syntax style script language like JavaScript/NodeJS or PHP, or Lua.