Salt is a powerful alternative to tools like Ansible, Puppet and Chef, available both as an open-source project and in versions supported by commercial partners. Be it SaltStack as the originator of the project, or for example SUSE, who have included Salt as a vital part of their SUSE Manager product.
Within NDE, we’ve been using the open-source variant of Salt for years and our experience with it confirms that Salt is a high-potential platform for automated configuration management of small, medium-sized and large environments – and even more if extending an existing configuration management solution, like coupling it with a CMDB and integrating it into work flow management. This is even true when doing this with the “SUSE Manager”-provided version: That Salt implementation is useful not only for the SUSE-shipped work flows, but can be extended easily and without hassle to also provide customer-specific functionality. Based on this experience, Salt has made it to the top of our list of preferred management tools.
On September 29, 2020, VMware’s plan to aquire SaltStack was announced. As we see it, this is a confirmation of our ongoing efforts: VMware provides solutions to create and run large and mission-critical virtualization environments and bringing Salt into this picture gives their customers a platform for efficient and highly automated operations of even large numbers of virtual machines across multiple virtualization clusters. These are the environments we have been focusing on for years, and thus we’re happy to see that now also VMware helps these customers to recognize the value of highly automated, integrated solutions to efficiently manage their virtualized and non-virtualized environments.