VMware Salt vs. Yarn

Managing heterogeneous environments of large numbers of nodes, especially nodes which may need sudden changes (security updates, for instance), or frequent replacement, is a strength for Saltstack. Simplicity is not a strength for Saltstack. In a homogenous environment (all CentOS 7, for example, with no Debian or Windows) I might recommend using Ansible instead - it is less flexible and granular, but simpler to configure.

Incentivized

There is really no real reason why not to use Yarn today. It's much faster than npm, and you will need a dependency management system anyway. The only thing that might be missing is the fact that it doesn't come natively with NodeJS, and you have to install it yourself. I'd like to see the NodeJS ecosystem include Yarn by default.

Incentivized

• A superb remote execution framework! SaltStack allows us to easily program numerous functions on top of it. For example, we developed a fast parallel asynchronous deployment tool that handles all software deployment, including interdependent service management.
• Configuration management is now easy. We take advantage of this to automate (in tandem with AWS tools) the stand-up of all servers and services. It is also relatively easy to create new configuration management states for software not yet supported by the community (e.g. Grafana).
• Flexibility. Numerous small utilities have been built which simply wrap around SaltStack to allow tedious tasks to become easy.

Incentivized

• Package management
• Speed of download compared to npm
• Moduel version control

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Rarely, some server connection error appear, while npm works alright.
• Sometimes, deleting the whole vendor directory is the best solution to solve weird issues.
• You still might need npm to install Yarn.

Incentivized

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.

I've used shell scripts over ssh, custom in-house deployment tools, Chef, and SaltStack. I've evaluated Ansible, but I was never happy with performance over SSH. Chef's loose configuration data model and lack of philosophy and conventions around use makes it difficult for a team to share responsibility for configuration code. Needing to use additional tools to do orchestration for cross-host/agent dependency relationships made me look for more. SaltStack, while not as mature when I first tried it, impressed me with its speed and elegant design

Incentivized

Compared to npm, Yarn is a clear winner here. npm does not look to be getting any improvements recently. And it's much much slower to run when installing project dependencies. This has a clear impact on the developer productivity but also makes deployments slower. So Yarn is still a much superior choice.

Incentivized

• SaltStack has reduced the time it takes to deploy new machines for us 10-fold.
• It is much easier for us to maintain compliance with industry standards with SaltStack.
• No negative impacts!

Incentivized

• Deployments happen much faster.
• Building and testing our apps is much more streamlined and efficient.
• Makes it easier to write reusable code.

Incentivized