Why would you pick Salt over Ansible
August 01, 2016
Why would you pick Salt over Ansible
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
SaltStack (legacy)
Overall Satisfaction with VMware vRealize Automation, with SaltStack Config
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.
- 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.
- Engineering spends less time on Ops
- Engineering has more time to build features
- Server farm is more stable, which means better uptime and happier customer, as well as less pages for engineers.
Ansible and Salt have emerged around the same time, and are pretty close.
Ansible pros:
- seems to have a better community these days.
- it is simpler to setup.
- DSL is considered to be simpler.
Salt pros:
- It is better for auto scaling environment.
- DSL might not be as intuitive, but it's well-designed, very powerful and consistent.
Ansible pros:
- seems to have a better community these days.
- it is simpler to setup.
- DSL is considered to be simpler.
Salt pros:
- It is better for auto scaling environment.
- DSL might not be as intuitive, but it's well-designed, very powerful and consistent.