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SaltStack has proven to be an invaluable tool for managing complex IT infrastructures and automating critical infrastructure tasks. Users …
Overview
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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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://github.com/saltstack/salt
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
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…
Product Demos
SaltStack agentless management using salt-ssh
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SaltStack salt-ssh quickstart
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Product Details
- About
- 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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-10 of 10)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 27, 2021
SaltStack - pain-free infrastructure-as-code
- Reproducible set up of servers
- Wide array of formulas ("packages")
- Execution time is sometime longer compared to alternatives
March 04, 2020
SaltStack doesn't make me feel Salty.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Event engine/configuration.
- Vulnerability reporting.
- Compliance.
- It's growing fast, so stability.
May 23, 2017
Spicing up Linux infrastructure management
- 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
May 01, 2017
Seasoned advice about SaltStack
- 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.
August 08, 2016
SaltStack is recommended!
- 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.
August 05, 2016
Saltstack is complicated and beautiful - a rare combination
- 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.
August 05, 2016
SaltStack is AMAZING!!
- 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
August 01, 2016
Why would you pick Salt over Ansible
- Rich, powerful DSL
- Highly scalable – fast, parallel deployment to dozens of nodes
- Strong community
- 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.
July 29, 2016
Saltstack give your operation tasks a sweet taste
- 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
- Dynamically generated configuration files with Jinja.
- Software deployment and configuration automation.
- Very simple YAMLl/Jinja syntax.
- It's easy to install and maintain.
- 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.