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SaltStack has proven to be an invaluable tool for managing complex IT infrastructures and automating critical infrastructure tasks. Users …
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What is Salt?
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…
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What is Salt?
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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For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://github.com/saltstack/salt
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What is Ansible?
The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and…
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SaltStack agentless management using salt-ssh
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SaltStack salt-ssh quickstart
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Product Details
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- Tech Details
What is Salt?
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 is presented as ideal for configuration management because it is pluggable, customizable, and plays well with many existing technologies. Salt enables users to deploy and manage applications that use any tech stack running on nearly any operating system, including different types of network devices such as switches and routers from a variety of vendors.
Salt is presented as ideal for configuration management because it is pluggable, customizable, and plays well with many existing technologies. Salt enables users to deploy and manage applications that use any tech stack running on nearly any operating system, including different types of network devices such as switches and routers from a variety of vendors.
Developed at SaltStack, which was acquired by VMware in late 2020, Salt is still available open source and community supported, while the former SaltStack Enterprise and SaltStack SecOps solutions became part of the VMware vRealize Automation solution as the SaltStack Config software configuration management add-on for that solution.
Salt Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD |
| Mobile Application | No |
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- 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.
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Reviews
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May 23, 2017
Spicing up Linux infrastructure management
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).
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
May 01, 2017
Seasoned advice about SaltStack
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'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.
August 08, 2016
SaltStack is recommended!
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
I have used the following:
CFEngine
Puppet
Chef (only a cursory usage after a one day course)
Ansible (cursory usage after reading a book on Ansible)
Chef is the closest competitor to SaltStack. It is slower though and requires a somewhat complicated installation.
Puppet is slow. The design requires the bulk of work to happen on the Puppet master. It does not scale well. It is built for 2005 servers, not cloud.
Ansible is ssh only by design. Orchestration is very difficult to achieve.
CFEngine
Puppet
Chef (only a cursory usage after a one day course)
Ansible (cursory usage after reading a book on Ansible)
Chef is the closest competitor to SaltStack. It is slower though and requires a somewhat complicated installation.
Puppet is slow. The design requires the bulk of work to happen on the Puppet master. It does not scale well. It is built for 2005 servers, not cloud.
Ansible is ssh only by design. Orchestration is very difficult to achieve.
August 05, 2016
Saltstack is complicated and beautiful - a rare combination
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- With Saltstack helping to keep my environment managed and under control, I have gone from spending 30-40 hours per week in Ops and 0-10 in Dev, to spending less than 5 hours in Ops most weeks.
Chef and Puppet both require writing code, which I view as excessively involved for the task at hand. I have only needed to write pure python for a handful of Saltstack use cases - everything else has been configuration files.
Ansible, while elegant and simple, simply does not have the abstraction layer or the granularity that Saltstack does.
Cfengine has a reputation for complexity, and a relatively small community at this time.
Ansible, while elegant and simple, simply does not have the abstraction layer or the granularity that Saltstack does.
Cfengine has a reputation for complexity, and a relatively small community at this time.
July 29, 2016
Saltstack give your operation tasks a sweet taste
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.
Saltstack is used for deployment on the different nodes in a consistent way.
- 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
- Having a centralized master lead to a single point of failure. Having a native distributed architecture would be appreciated
- Ops team gains a lot of time on repetitive tasks and can focus on improvement and automation
- There is no limit with Saltstack, a part of everything can be automated
I looked at Chef and Ansible but it was a long time ago and I don't remember the pros and cons compared to SaltStack.
When I arrived at my company, Saltstack was already used in production so there has been no discussion about other deployment and automation solutions
When I arrived at my company, Saltstack was already used in production so there has been no discussion about other deployment and automation solutions