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Salt Project Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 6.3 out of 10
Score
6.3 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Salt Project are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

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.

Reviews

10 Reviews

SaltStack - pain-free infrastructure-as-code

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

  • Execution time is sometime longer compared to alternatives

Likelihood to Recommend

Salt Open Source Automation Engine is great for configuring servers in a centralised manner. It is not well suited for creating infrastructure, where tools like Terraform should be used instead.

VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
3 years of experience

SaltStack doesn't make me feel Salty.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Right now SaltStack & 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.

Pros

  • Event engine/configuration.
  • Vulnerability reporting.
  • Compliance.

Cons

  • It's growing fast, so stability.

Likelihood to Recommend

SaltStack is good if you want to be able to proactively respond to events, manage systems at scale, or to ensure compliance or search for vulnerabilities within your infrastructure. It allows you to control a wide range of systems, even beyond Linux hosts.

VU
Verified User
General Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
3 years of experience

Spicing up Linux infrastructure management

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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).

Pros

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

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

SaltStack can be used to manage large server farms and for configuration management. SaltStack does very well with Linux and Unix systems and is also able to manage Windows servers and clients; however, managing Windows is not its biggest strength. SaltStack should not be introduced if the amount of servers to be managed is very small (e.g. less than 3-4).

VH
Valentin Höbel
Cloud Architect in Information Technology at open *i GmbH (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
4 years of experience
View profile

Seasoned advice about SaltStack

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

JM
Jeremy McMillan
Systems Administrator, Deployment Specialist Consultant in Professional Services at SAP Hybris (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
2 years of experience
View profile

SaltStack is recommended!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Hospitality Pulse uses SaltStack for the automation of critical infrastructure in our AWS infrastructure (multiple VPCs). We also built a custom software deployment orchestrator on top of SaltStack. SaltStack is a cornerstone piece in our highly available architecture and hands-off server automation.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • There are no big issues with SaltStack. I'll highlight a few minor items to consider here. One is version numbers of the software. This can be a little confusing to newcomers.
  • The documentation is good now, but used to be lacking.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited:

Configuration Management

Orchestration of Services/Applications in regard to each other or infrastructure

Custom tooling - wonderful event bus for asynchronous event driven actions

Instant remote access (command execution) to tens/hundreds/thousands of servers with very flexible targeting

Ability to put network nodes under configuration management even if they are unable to run a "minion" via proxy minions

Less appropriate use of SaltStack? If you have only one server and want to manage it very poorly resulting in difficult hours of trouble-shooting then don't use SaltStack.

WC
William Cannon
Infrastructure Architect in Engineering at hospitalityPulse (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
4 years of experience
View profile

Saltstack is complicated and beautiful - a rare combination

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Saltstack to manage ~400 remote nodes, and ~35 server nodes. It handles configuration management, rapid deploys, rapid updates of security vulnerabilities, and targeted data acquisition.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Saltstack could use more intermediate-level documentation and tutorials. Most of the information out there tends to leap from "install apache" (the "hello world" of configuration management) straight to the most complex scenarios.
  • Similarly, more outreach to a wider audience would be useful. In the same way that widespread use of git and vim makes these easy stacks to require of new engineers, widespread use of Saltstack by amateurs and dabblers would be helpful for saltstack.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
2 years of experience

SaltStack is AMAZING!!

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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)

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

We use SaltStack all the time but it is really handy when a new zero-day exploit has gets announced and we need to check package versions across a bunch of machines. We can easily check vulnerabilities by issuing one command on the master server. It's just as easy to patch the machines once you have a maintenance window. One command and it's done.

SM
Steven Marshall, RHCSA
Director of IT in Information Technology at Viaero Wireless (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
3 years of experience
View profile

Why would you pick Salt over Ansible

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We've used SaltStack throughout the whole engineering team of our company for provisioning of both AWS instances and baremetal servers. Previously we've been using Fabric for this, but it has become unusable once we've grew beyond 25 servers, and our environment become heterogeneous. Engineers couldn't keep track of what's happening in the server farm any more, and SaltStack and it's declarative language allowed us to bring up instances to desired state in a quick and reliable way.

Pros

  • Rich, powerful DSL
  • Highly scalable – fast, parallel deployment to dozens of nodes
  • Strong community

Cons

  • Steep learning curve
  • No sandbox, dry run, or execution plan mode. It's hard to iterate quickly during development, and quite easy to break things during development.
  • Copying huge amount of small files is slow and suboptimal — make sure to package your software into tarball/dpkg/your favorite package format if you need to copy it to the instance.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need to frequently set up or update a large amount of server instances, Salt and Ansible are probably the two most popular options these days. The key difference is probably the master-minion model of Salt, where minions can pull the state from master, while Ansible emphasizes "push" model (there's ansible-pull, but it seems to be an afterthought).

In practice, this means with Salt it's trivial to build an AMI which will pull state from master on startup and bring the new instance into service. You can use that instance with AutoScaling group, and voila — you have a scalable cluster on full auto.

VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
1 year of experience

Saltstack give your operation tasks a sweet taste

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company is doing web video conferencing and therefore as an important platform distributed in many datacenters all over the world.

Saltstack is used for deployment on the different nodes in a consistent way.

Pros

  • Easy to configure and maintain since it is centralized, and there is also discovery
  • Can adapt to a lot of situations with the minimum of configuration. It is easy to write and deploy our own templates and modules
  • The documentation is easy to read and exhaustive

Cons

  • Having a centralized master lead to a single point of failure. Having a native distributed architecture would be appreciated

Likelihood to Recommend

Saltstack is useful when the architecture is complex and repetitive. With Saltstack, there is no need to connect to a single machine (except the master itself), everything can be automated

VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
1 year of experience

Better start using SaltStack today - and save lots of your time tomorrow!

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SaltStack is used in the whole organization as the only service for configuration management, continuous delivery, user management, package management, data distribution etc.

Pros

  • Dynamically generated configuration files with Jinja.
  • Software deployment and configuration automation.
  • Very simple YAMLl/Jinja syntax.
  • It's easy to install and maintain.

Cons

  • Still lots of bugs, but they are being fixed pretty quickly.
  • We sometimes have scaling problems while running hundreds of states across hundreds of servers.
  • Out of box reporting is not clear. For example, I launched installation of the new package across 400 servers, and I only want to know where it FAILED - it's not easy with SaltStack.

Likelihood to Recommend

If your team is OK with Python and coding overall - SaltStack the best choice.

IT
Ilya Trushchenko
DevOps Engineer, Team Lead in Information Technology at AnchorFree (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Salt Project
2 years of experience
View profile