Name: Salt Project
Rating: 6.5 (35 reviews)
Author: Open Source

Help Desk

Live Chat

Web and Video Conferencing

Customer Support

AI Development

Image Recognition

Version Control

Development

Business Intelligence (BI)

Collaboration

Enterprise Legal Management

Transportation & Logistics

Workflow

Enterprise

Accounting

Anti-Money Laundering (AML)

Investor Relations

Finance and Accounting

Applicant Tracking

Corporate Learning Management

HR Management

HR Service Delivery

Payroll

Talent Intelligence

Talent Management

Workforce Analytics

Workforce Management

Human Resources

Cloud Brokers

Cloud Storage

Converged Network Adapters (CNAs)

Custom Software Development Services

Data Integration

Data Privacy Management

Database Load Balancing

Density-Optimized Servers

Fraud Detection

Governance, Risk & Compliance

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

Migration

Mobile Application Performance Monitoring  (APM)

Network Performance Monitoring

NoSQL Databases

Privileged Access Management

Release Management

Server Management

Tape Storage

Time Series Databases

Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)

Information Technology

A/B Testing

AI Writing Assistant Software

Ad Serving & Retargeting

All-in-One Marketing

Content Management

Customer Experience Management

Customer Journey Mapping

Digital Experience Intelligence

Digital Rewards

Email Marketing

Marketing Automation

Mobile Advertising

Press Release Management

Product Information Management (PIM)

Product Intelligence

Social Media Management

Survey & Forms Building

Tag Management

Video Collaboration

Web Analytics

Marketing

Project Management

Professional Services

Customer Communication Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Headless eCommerce

eCommerce Analytics

Sales

Animation

Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

Construction Workforce Management

Loan Servicing

Patient Engagement

Vertical-Specific

Find top rated software and services based on in-depth reviews from verified users. 400+ software categories including PaaS, NoSQL, BI, HR, and more.

Microsoft Intune

Microsoft

Tanium

HashiCorp Terraform

HashiCorp

NinjaOne

HashiCorp Packer

AWS Systems Manager

Amazon AWS

FireMon

HCL BigFix

HCLSoftware

ServiceNow IT Service Management

ServiceNow

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat

Cons:
1. Learning Curve: Some users have found the syntax and configuration of the Masterless and salt-ssh features to have a learning curve. They mentioned that while best practices and features have improved, much of the community code needs to be updated to take advantage of them. Users suggested that diligent testing and making small changes help with avoiding getting overwhelmed, but it's still easy to get lost.
2. Documentation: Reviewers mentioned that the documentation for Masterless and salt-ssh features is not as well-documented or easy to use compared to other technologies like Ansible. Although they acknowledged that there has been an improvement, some users noted a lack of documentation in the past. They also suggested that SaltStack could benefit from more intermediate-level documentation and tutorials.
3. Scaling Problems: Users experienced scaling problems when running hundreds of states across numerous servers, indicating potential performance issues related to scalability.

SaltStack has proven to be an invaluable tool for managing complex IT infrastructures and automating critical infrastructure tasks. Users have reported using SaltStack to manage configurations on over 100 CentOS virtual machines, simplifying the setup process and efficiently configuring essential elements such as NTP, DNS, user accounts, and automounted NFS home drives. The ability to install base package sets for different machine types based on their respective groups has further streamlined the configuration process.

Additionally, SaltStack is being utilized in various environments, including integration lab environments for instructional workshops and cloud-based development projects. Its orchestration capabilities allow users to easily configure highly available architectures and automate server management tasks. Furthermore, SaltStack's extensive feature set in configuration management, orchestration, remote execution, and cloud management make it a preferred choice for managing large fleets of systems at scale.

Organizations across industries have found SaltStack to be an essential tool for their needs. Some companies have built custom deployment orchestrators on top of SaltStack to automate critical infrastructure across multiple VPCs in AWS, while others rely on it organization-wide for configuration management, continuous delivery, user management, package management, and data distribution. Overall, SaltStack's versatility and robust functionality make it an indispensable asset in managing complex IT environments efficiently and effectively.

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.

Salt Project

Configuration Management

SaltStack salt-ssh quickstart

SaltStack agentless management using salt-ssh

Likelihood to Recommend

Support Rating

Open Source

Tools and features offered by configuration management software.

Infrastructure Automation

Automate the setup of systems to achieve their desired state using configuration files.

Automated Provisioning

Automatically and systematically deploy, configure, and manage IT infrastructure and resources.

Parallel Execution

Allows for the simultaneous execution of configuration changes across multiple nodes or components.

Node Management

Allows for the administration and oversight of individual devices or systems within a network.

Reporting & Logging

Generate reports and logs to track changes made to configurations, aiding in troubleshooting and auditing.

Inventory Control

Maintain an inventory of all devices, servers, and components in the infrastructure and track the configurations and attributes of each item.

Track changes made to configurations over time. Allowing for rollback to previous configurations if needed.

Role-based access control

Implement RBAC to control access to configuration management features based on roles and responsibilities.

Salt Open Source Automation Engine 2021-04-22 10:23:33

Systems Administrator, Deployment Specialist Consultant

SaltStack 2017-05-01 10:30:17

Cloud Architect

SaltStack 2017-05-22 03:03:00

SaltStack 2020-02-28 18:15:06

Director of IT

SaltStack 2016-08-05 09:47:36

TrustRadius is a technology and business research firm based in Austin, Texas. The company is known as a review platform for verified B2B technology and software reviews through a proprietary algorithm and human verification.

TrustRadius

Learning curve

Complex scenarios

Small files

Not clear

Well documented

Big issues

Single point

Easy to use

Little confusing

Point of failure

Configuration management

Software deployment

Easy to install

Easy to configure

Operating system

Initial configuration

Easy to write

Package manager

Install and configure

Highly scalable

Home

Configuration Management Tools

Salt

We use Salt Open Source Automation Engine primarily to configure our servers. It is used primarily to ensure that all servers are configured in a unitary way and that we have a central repository that defines what is deployed where. We also use it to quickly spin up test infrastructure and to configure developer workstations.

Reproducible set up of servers
Wide array of formulas ("packages")

Execution time is sometime longer compared to alternatives

Infrastructure as a code
Separation of concerns using states/pillars/grains
Flexible deployment - master/minion vs masterless

Much faster turnaround in provisoning test environments
Quicker rollout of services

We use SaltStack to orchestrate and configure complex integration lab environments for instructional workshops. We are developing a full-cycle cloud portable/agnostic DevOps workflow template for Hybris Commerce projects to support full velocity distributed development efforts with CI and CD pipeline.

One tool to provide both configuration management and orchestration at any scale.
Modular and extensible code (modules, formulas, packages) with a very active community promotes community-style development within your own organization.
Great documentation has made massive strides in the past two years.

Masterless (serverless) and salt-ssh (agentless) features are not as well documented or easy to use as other competitive technologies (ie. Ansible).
Debugging YAML+Jinja templated configuration is getting better, but is still occasionally frustrating. Diligent testing on small changes helps, but it's easy to get lost doing too much too fast.
Best practices and features have improved a lot in the past year, but much of the community code needs to be updated to take advantage of them.

Combined orchestration and configuration management allows one or two engineers to manage all of the Hybris Sysadmin Workshop lab infrastructure for multiple concurrent workshops combined.
SaltStack provides in one tool, configuration management which serves the functions of systems management, audit, and change management.
Getting ROI from SaltStack or any DevOps tool requires a cultural ambassador to build and develop process requirements and DevOps architecture, and while this can have dramatic bottom line results, people often struggle to adapt, so implementation can be stilted by lack of leadership.
DevOps in general should not be pursued as a way to recover operational costs on its own, but rather to use operational savings to subsidize increased quality. SaltStack requires infrastructure investments, and development investments, and time investments for additional testing cycles in the pipeline. The ROI it produces is enabling more, faster parallel development, without sacrificing the ability to maintain testing and quality, or to increase testing and quality while maintaining or reducing the cost of quality process. If you just want more for less and you're willing to ship broken product to get better short term bottom line: just ship broken product, skip the DevOps investment.

I can not provide many details. However, let's say that SaltStack was used for the whole Linux infrastructure.

SaltStack is able to provide many benefits within one set of tools: Configuration Management, Orchestration, massive parallel sys administration and remote execution and cloud management.

With SaltStack, one is able to manage complex IT infrastructures, consisting of internal and external provides (such as Azure, for example).

Configuration Management
Parallel system administration
Remote Execution
Cloud connectors
Orchestration
Update and patch management
Automation

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

It is hard to measure since SaltStack is free and open-source software
SaltStack makes it possible to manage a large server farm with only few staff members

Right now SaltStack &amp; SaltStack SecOps are being used within multiple departments. We have been using them to manage a large fleet of systems at scale. We are using them both as an Event Engine/Configuration management system as well as a tool for governance and vulnerabilities. It works very well for both uses.

Event engine/configuration.
Vulnerability reporting.
Compliance.

It has allowed my team to be able to manage large scale systems.
It has allowed us to have a central viewpoint on the health of our systems.

Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation)

We use SaltStack to manage the configuration on over 100 CentOS virtual machines. It makes it so much easier to set up a new machine, as soon as it's on the network we Salt it and it configures NTP, DNS, user accounts, automounted NFS home drives. We also have base package sets for the different types of machines that we have and SaltStack installs them all based on the group they are in.

Very easy to run a single command against multiple machines at once
Low maintenance once after the initial configuration is done
Very easy to install and configure clients (minions)

There is a little bit of a learning curve to figure out the syntax to the configuration

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!

Salt

Overview

What is Salt?