AWS Config vs. Salt Project

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS Config
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services offers AWS Config, a service that provides monitoring and assessment of AWS resource configurations to support compliance auditing, change management and troubleshooting, with resource histories and comparison of historical configurations against planned configurations.N/A
Salt
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.N/A
Pricing
AWS ConfigSalt Project
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS ConfigSalt
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsWith AWS Config, you are charged based on the number of configuration items recorded, the number of active AWS Config rule evaluations and the number of conformance pack evaluations in your account. A configuration item is a record of the configuration state of a resource in your AWS account. An AWS Config rule evaluation is a compliance state evaluation of a resource by an AWS Config rule in your AWS account, and a conformance pack evaluation is the evaluation of a resource by an AWS Config rule within the conformance pack.—
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
AWS ConfigSalt Project
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Medium-sized Companies
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All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS ConfigSalt Project
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(6 ratings)
8.0
(10 ratings)
Performance
9.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS ConfigSalt Project
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
It's really good if your infrastructure services is all in AWS, that means everything could be audited and monitored using AWS config. You also can create alarms to notify you or your team about any changes on your AWS resources which is very useful to prevent abuse if you have a fairly large team. It's also very useful whenever some third party wants to audit your AWS resources, if you have a fairly comprehensive AWS config configured, the auditing process will be easy since they only need to look at your AWS config setup.
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Open Source
SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • The ability to track changes in AWS is paramount, AWS config allows you to do this
  • Allows the auditing of an AWS account
  • Can view history of an account that has AWS config enabled
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Open Source
  • Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
  • Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
  • Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • It's only AWS, no third party.
  • Not the most intuitive interface, but with a little getting used to it is OK.
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Open Source
  • Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
  • SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
  • SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started
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Performance
Amazon AWS
Would rate lower for other workloads but for AWS workloads its simple to set up, cost effective and customisable. Primary use case is compliance from a governance perspective.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Open Source
We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
I do not know or have used any other product in AWS cloud space that matches what AWS Config provides. We have some custom built monitoring and governance, however that is there because AWS Config does not provide it currently.
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Open Source
We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Enforcing audit requirements
  • Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
  • Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches
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Open Source
  • We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
  • Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
  • Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.
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