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Salt stack, the simpler puppet

saltstack.com

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Re: Salt stack, the simpler puppet

#3

Post by aethr »

Their website doesn't make it obvious where to go if you just want to download salt and get started. It seems to want to steer you towards SaltStack Enterprise.

However, you can find installation instructions (which include where to download) for all OSes here:

http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/installation/index.html

I have yet to check Salt out, but as someone who's just come off the back of Puppet's steep learning curve and lack of robust modules, it's something I'd like to look into.

Re: Salt stack, the simpler puppet

#4

Post by cutie »

rdtsc wrote: post #2

I started looking at ansible but like salt stack better now. Windows support is one think I liked better about it. I wish I didn't have to deal with Windows but unfortunately I do and salt has the support for it. http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/windows-package-manager.html

I have some windows admin work to do as well. However I prefer that ansible doesn't require daemons on every host, so I was a bit torn on which to use.

Searched around a bit and found pave. It has the things I need (admittedly straightforward) and is about as simple as it gets. Would be great if it could get some love, as I appreciate the no-nonsense design. https://bitbucket.org/mixmastamyk/pave

Re: Salt stack, the simpler puppet

#5

Post by secstate »

Ansible playbooks read about a million times more obviously to me than salt config files. Probably that's just due to me putting in the effort to learn, but I think there's a thread of truth in there too. For one thing, Ansible makes it easy for non-devops folks to just walk through what they'd need to do to provision a box, and then turn that walk through into an ansible playbook.

I also appreciate that there are a number of ways to set things up in Ansible, which makes it easy to write simple playbooks, and easy to write complex ones with multiple roles and branches as well.

At the end of the day, conf management has so many facets that I've learned to stop arguing the merits of one over another and just accept that there are different strokes for different folks.

Re: Salt stack, the simpler puppet

#6

Post by techwizrd »

secstate wrote: post #5

Ansible playbooks read about a million times more obviously to me than salt config files. Probably that's just due to me putting in the effort to learn, but I think there's a thread of truth in there too. For one thing, Ansible makes it easy for non-devops folks to just walk through what they'd need to do to provision a box, and then turn that walk through into an ansible playbook. I also appreciate that there are a…

I agree. I prefer Ansible because I can get something prototyped and built faster with it and it's easy to refactor a playbook into something more complex and more reusable.

Re: Salt stack, the simpler puppet

#8

Post by bsaul »

aethr wrote: post #3

Their website doesn't make it obvious where to go if you just want to download salt and get started. It seems to want to steer you towards SaltStack Enterprise. However, you can find installation instructions (which include where to download) for all OSes here: http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/installation/index.html I have yet to check Salt out, but as someone who's just come off the back of Puppet's steep learning…

Here :

http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/tutorials/walkthrough.html

And if you're on a mac :

http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/tutorials/walkthrough_macos...

Re: Salt stack, the simpler puppet

#9

Post by njpatel »

At Ayatii we use Salt both for initial configuration and scaling. It's very easy to get setup, and the concepts of States, Pillars and Reactors are easy enough to grasp and start hacking useful utilities for your deployment.

For instance, with a couple lines of Python, I was able to 'react' to any new DigitalOcean instance that was created and able to update DNS records or Nginx config (if it was a certain type of instance). As someone is more of a developer than a infrastructure person, Salt saved me a lot of time.

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