SaltStack

I had heard of Puppet. I had heard of Chef. And I knew Ansible quite well because someone I know looked at all three (Puppet, Chef and Ansible) and chose Ansible for our organization.

I had never heard of Salt.

Until now.

Mirantis uses Salt to manage OpenStack infrastructure.

So in having some familiarity with Ansible, it made sense to type into the search engine:
"ansible vs salt'.

Well, sure enough. Someone has done a comparison.

Ansible vs Salt

What I see a number of people doing with Salt, is running remote commands on nodes that they otherwise might not have access to. But - recently, I have started looking more into Salt and it appears to be architected quite similar to Ansible, and is also quite powerful.

One of the features I have recently played around with, is the ability to use "Salt Grains". You can get all kinds of "grains of information" from a host with Salt Grains. In my case, I am calling Salt and telling it to give me all of the grains for all of the hosts in JSON format - and then I parse the json and make a csv spreadsheet. Pretty cool.

There's a lot more. Like Salt States (equivalent to Ansible Modules I think?). There are Salt Pillars.

They use the "salt" theme pretty well in naming all of their extensions.

This link, is called Salt in Ten Minutes. Gives a pretty good overview.

Salt in Ten Minutes

This link, below, is quite handy in figuring out how to target your minions using regular expressions.
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/targeting/globbing.html#regular-expressions