Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

Rendering output to JSON is super annoying when your commands have lots of '\n....\n....\n....\n....' in them and you're trying to find the "line" where the relevant error message appeared from the command called by your state.

Also, there are some messages (e.g. ssh key verification failed) that require a higher level of verbosity than they should for the correct error to appear.

Still light-years better than puppet or chef though.

IMO, it's three things:

* A push-by-default model rather than pull-by-default (that never made sense to me: option, maybe - default, HELL no).

* A focus on minimizing the dependencies (puppet has a ton of annoying unnecessary and attack-surface-increasing/ RAM-gobbling dependencies from the agent to the SSL authentication).

* Not using a DSL - just using YAML and an intentionally dumb templating language - helping to enforce a far cleaner separation between configuration and code (the divide can get muddied with puppet because its DSL is too powerful).

To be clear: Starting with Ansible was amazing, the first couple steps were easy and enlightening. Maybe I'm expecting too much now and act entitled or something? That said, it broke down rather quickly.

- My first issue was documentation. This article is correct about the current state of the documentation, but the site was in a really bad state in limbo (between redesigns or something) for quite some time. Offers on the mailing list (Not by me) to restructure the website, as a community effort, were declined. Basically the documentation was, from this point of view, unusable before the current design went live. Broken links, no easy structure.. It was 'an adventure'.

- The bigger/biggest gripe: Everything I try to do in Ansible seems to turn into a shell script. Limitations in Ansible and the "Use a template for bug reports"/laggy response on GitHub lead to workarounds all over the place, where I had to resort to 'raw:' and/or 'shell:' where there should be a reasonable way to do things. One (of quite some) examples would be [1]: For starting random services (postgresql, dovecot in my case) Ansible just breaks and hangs forever in my environment. Ah well, let's resort to shell: service postgresql start (which .. doesn't do change tracking, isn't the same thing .. but works).

I'm really happy with what Ansible allowed me to do. I'm not satisfied with the result I have here and still look for a way to drop all my (necessary!) debug: and shell: modules for a different solution.

1: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/5923

According to the chart Ansible has been around since 2005? Salt is barely 2 years old? Look at the uptick of the last few months and SaltStack seems ever slightly steeper than Ansible.

I am SaltStack guy, albeit a newbie. Barely got done installing (much much easier than Puppet) and trying out few commands. I was hooked on SaltStack when I was able to run following command once and get result from multiple machines near simultaneously.

> salt "*" cmd.run "df -h'

I get result from all machines near simultaneously.

Above command is same as you logging into each machine (say hundreds or thousands) and running 'df -h' to see status of your storage space. You could write/test/deploy a shell script and push it out to all those machines. Or set up some monitoring system. Or install SaltStack across your network (very simple to do) and run above command once on your SaltStack server and get immediate feedback.

I tried working with Puppet long time ago. The idea of having 20 minute window for pushing out changes never seemed attractive to me.