What is Salt?

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.
Salt is a tool in the Server Configuration and Automation category of a tech stack.
Salt is an open source tool with 13.8K GitHub stars and 5.4K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Salt's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Salt?

Companies
145 companies reportedly use Salt in their tech stacks, including Robinhood, LinkedIn, and Lyft.

Developers
255 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Salt.

Salt Integrations

AWS CodeDeploy, Scaleway, StackStorm, Server Density, and Akeyless are some of the popular tools that integrate with Salt. Here's a list of all 5 tools that integrate with Salt.
Pros of Salt
46
Flexible
30
Easy
27
Remote execution
24
Enormously flexible
12
Great plugin API
10
Python
5
Extensible
3
Scalable
2
nginx
1
Vagrant provisioner
1
HipChat
1
Best IaaC
1
Automatisation
1
Parallel Execution

Blog Posts

Salt's Features

  • Remote execution is the core function of Salt. Running pre-defined or arbitrary commands on remote hosts.
  • Salt modules are the core of remote execution. They provide functionality such as installing packages, restarting a service, running a remote command, transferring files, and infinitely more
  • Building on the remote execution core is a robust and flexible configuration management framework. Execution happens on the minions allowing effortless, simultaneous configuration of tens of thousands of hosts.

Salt Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Salt?
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Sugar
It is a Javascript library that extends native objects with helpful methods. It is designed to be intuitive, unobtrusive, and let you do more with less code.
Terraform
With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Dotenv
It is a zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env. Storing configuration in the environment separate from code is based on The Twelve-Factor App methodology.
Chef
Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
See all alternatives

Salt's Followers
449 developers follow Salt to keep up with related blogs and decisions.