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Salt

Score6.2 out of 10

35 Reviews and Ratings

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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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Salt.
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SaltStack - pain-free infrastructure-as-code

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (1-10 employees employees)

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

Most Important Features

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

Return on Investment

  • Much faster turnaround in provisoning test environments
  • Quicker rollout of services

Alternatives Considered

Open Source Puppet

Seasoned advice about SaltStack

Incentivized
Jeremy McMillanView profile
Systems Administrator, Deployment Specialist Consultant in Professional Services at SAP Hybris (1001-5000 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Spicing up Linux infrastructure management

Incentivized
Valentin HöbelView profile
Cloud Architect in Information Technology at open *i GmbH (51-200 employees employees)

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

Return on Investment

  • 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

Alternatives Considered

Puppet, CFEngine and Ansible

Other Software Used

Kernel-based Virtual Machine

SaltStack doesn't make me feel Salty.

Verified User
General Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

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

Cons

  • It's growing fast, so stability.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation)

SaltStack is AMAZING!!

Incentivized
Steven Marshall, RHCSAView profile
Director of IT in Information Technology at Viaero Wireless (201-500 employees employees)

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

Return on Investment

  • 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!

Alternatives Considered

Puppet

Other Software Used

Nginx