Better start using SaltStack today - and save lots of your time tomorrow!
January 08, 2016

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

Ilya Trushchenko | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

SaltStack (legacy)

Overall Satisfaction with SaltStack

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.
  • Using SaltStack + Buildbot, we increased our deployment rate up to several deployments a day.
  • Devops engineers efficiency increased dramatically.
  • As SaltStack produces predictable results and eliminates the need in monotonous manual actions - overall reliability of our IT infrastructure increased.
  • Instead of wasting hours and even days debugging errors on some particular server - it's now easier to reinstall in completely with SaltStack.
  • Puppet - ugly and heavy, ruby-based, although has the best set of production-ready modules and can be a good choice for big enterprise.
  • Chef - outdated, ruby-based.
  • Ansible - slow due to ssh transport, but is the best alternative for SaltStack.
If your team is OK with Python and coding overall - SaltStack the best choice.

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