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.
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Travis CI
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Travis CI is an open source continuous integration platform, that enables users to run and test simultaneously on different environments, and automatically catch code failures and bugs.
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.
TravisCI is suited for workflows involving typical software development but unfortunately I think the software needs more improvement to be up to date with current development systems and TravisCI hasn't been improving much in that space in terms of integrations.
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.
I think they could have a cheaper personal plan. I'd love to use Travis on personal projects, but I don't want to publish them nor I can pay $69 a month for personal projects that I don't want to be open source.
There is no interface for configuring repos on Travis CI, you have to do it via a file in the repo. This make configuration very flexible, but also makes it harder for simpler projects and for small tweaks in the configuration.
TravisCI hasn't had much changes made to its software and has thus fallen behind compared to many other CI/CD applications out there. I can only give it a 5 because it does what it is supposed to do but lacks product innovation.
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.
After the private equity firm had bought this company the innovation and support has really gone downhill a lot. I am not a fan that they have gutted the software trying to make money from it and put innovation and product development second.
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.
Jenkins is much more complicated to configure and start using. Although, one you have done that, it's extremely powerful and full of features. Maybe many more than Travis CI. As per TeamCity, I would never go back to using it. It's also complicated to configure but it is not worth the trouble. Codeship supports integration with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket. I've only used it briefly, but it seems to be a nice tool.
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.
It's improved my ability to deliver working code, increasing my development velocity.
It increases confidence that your own work (and those of external contributors) does not have any obvious bugs, provided you have sufficient test coverage.
It helps to ensure consistent standards across a team (you can integrate process elements like "go lint" and other style checks as part of your build).
It's zero-cost for public/open source projects, so the only investment is a few minutes setting up a build configuration file (hence the return is very high).
The .travis.yml file is a great way for onboarding new developers, since it shows how to bootstrap a build environment and run a build "from scratch".
