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.

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.

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

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.

I started looking at Salt and really liked what I saw, but the first task I had to do was to provision some Windows Servers on Rackspace or AWS and configure them. Like the other commenter, I wish I didn't have to deal with Windows but I'm stuck with it. I found Saltcloud a bit bleeding edge for a newcomer to configuration management (although improving all the time) with Windows being its biggest weakness. When it comes to configuration, it also seemed to me (admittedly with limited experience) the Windows support in Salt is a poor cousin rather than an equal citizen. Don't get me wrong, it's good they have it at all, but you'll need to do a lot more work yourself. I plan to look at Chef next as a possible alternative since the Windows support seems more mature. No comments on Chef yet so I'd be interested to hear anyone else's experience with it, especially for a newcomer to config management tools.

My main experience is with Puppet, though I have migrated legacy systems from CFEngine as well. My main gripes with Puppet are that, at times, the DSL is restrictive and you have to either rely on ugly Execs or dropdown into Ruby extensions. I can see how this can be off putting to beginners.

The advantages though once we've gotten comfortable have made our infrastructure smarter and more resilient.

- Idempotency (If you're careful)

- Abstracting configuration data vs methods. Passwords/Keys/Addresses are kept in a Hiera config file and the manifests merely access these variables instead of hardcoding when applying changes.

- PuppetDB as a canonical reference of the state of all our infrastructure. What are all my servers running MySQL? Which version? Where are all my Ceph MDSs?

- Exported resources (also relying on PuppetDB), enabling propagation of information about new nodes to all others. A godsend when paired with Nagios.

Does Salt have anything that matches these use cases?

Am loving Salt since switching from Puppet a year or so ago.

In conjunction with Salt Cloud I type a one liner to spin up a new Linode, battle harden it, and install my stack on it.

They've also recently added some states for supporting docker containers which looks interesting.

We use saltstack at Zenpayroll.com to manage our servers, and I think it works pretty well. Not 100% sold on the jinja/python stuff, but it does the job.

I really want to give Salt a try. I've worked with Puppet and find the syntax ugly and the logic weird (e.g. all variables are essentially final and can't be changed in cases after having a value).

Big fan of the speed and simplicity of salt vs puppet. Plus it is multiple useful tools in one for me (configuration management, system provisioning and remote execution)

We switched away from puppet towards Salt. The broad stroked opinion is that salt covers all of puppet 's use cases, with advantages in terms of both performance and extensibility.

It is idempotent; there is a central configuration db (a couple of options, actually; we use pillar, a YAML set of files for its simplicity). Exported resources are handled a bit differently (you pull data from servers at config time instead of pushing at export time) but cover the same functionality. The same functionality covers software configuration inventory.

Where it excels is in performance. Our deployment runs on puppet took some 15min, salt handles them in 30s.

I also like its codebase. It is clear and well documented, easy to extend. I am biased towards python instead of Ruby, so take my opinion with a grain of salt (heh:-)

- Idempotency

Yes, the run will report on each salt state which can result in either: failed (with a reason), succeeded (with a description what changed), succeeded (nothing changed). Each salt state provided by the project is also intelligent about its use of resources - for example, if you have multiple pkg.installed, the list of available packages will be pulled only once and all states will be able to determine quickly if they need to run.

- Abstracting configuration data vs methods

Methods -> salt states; Configuration data -> grains/pillar. Grains are kind of attributes that belong to a host (like hostname, system version, installed packages, available ips, etc.), while pillar is a plugin system that can provide external data (it can be used like puppetdb too; I've got a plugin that pulls json files from s3 and talks makes it available as a simple hash for example). If you know chef, think attributes/databags (but better).

- PuppetDB as a canonical reference of the state of all our infrastructure.

It doesn't actually provide this out of the box, but provides the needed elements so this is trivial. Basically you can query all your nodes from the salt server (or nodes can query each other). You just need to extract the bits you need and save them to whatever destination you want. For example on the server run `salt -G 'roles:database' grains.item mem_total` and save the data. You can also define a "returner" which is a plugin that handles the data you get back and for example implement something that writes the data back into your information store/cmdb.

- Exported resources (also relying on PuppetDB), enabling propagation of information about new nodes to all others.

Pillar again. Although depending on what you want to achieve, you may want to enable some querying between the nodes, so that one of them can just broadcast some message at runtime and work on results.