A collection of links following a discussion led by webchick on dev list:

• http://drupal.org/project/patterns: Module/system configurations that can be run at any time
• http://drupal.org/project/hostmaster: Bryght's multisite hosting managed site deployment framework, which includes
• http://drupal.org/project/hosting and http://drupal.org/project/provision
• http://drupal.org/project/autopilot: Migrate changes from dev to live
• http://drupal.org/project/deploy: Migrate changes from dev to live
• http://drupal.org/project/drush: Command-line tool containing a bunch of useful commands such as running cron, downloading modules, etc.
• http://drupal.org/project/domain: “The Domain Access project is a group of lightweight modules that provide tools for running a group of affiliated sites from one Drupal installation and a single shared database.”