Docker vs Salt: What are the differences?

Isolation: Docker focuses on creating isolated containers that encapsulate applications and their dependencies, ensuring consistency and portability across different environments. On the other hand, Salt is more geared towards configuration management and automation, allowing for efficient management of infrastructure and network devices.
Purpose: Docker is primarily used for packaging and deploying applications in lightweight, portable containers, making it easy to scale and manage distributed applications. In contrast, Salt is designed for orchestrating infrastructure, automating configuration changes, and ensuring uniformity across servers and devices in a network.
Architecture: Docker follows a client-server architecture where Docker Engine manages containers and images, while Salt utilizes a master-minion architecture where the Salt master controls and communicates with Salt minions on target systems. This distinction affects how tasks are executed and managed within each system.
Ease of Use: Docker provides a user-friendly interface and commands for managing containers, images, and networks, making it accessible to developers and system administrators. Salt, on the other hand, requires a deeper understanding of configuration files, states, and pillars to effectively automate and manage infrastructure, which may have a steeper learning curve.
Community Support: Docker boasts a large community of users and contributors, leading to a wealth of resources, plugins, and integrations that enhance its capabilities. Salt also has a strong community backing, with a focus on infrastructure automation, networking, and cloud orchestration, providing support for a wide range of use cases and environments.
Scalability: Docker excels in containerization and scaling applications horizontally, allowing for efficient resource utilization and deployment in microservices architectures. In contrast, Salt is more suited for managing configurations and enforcing policies across a large number of servers or network devices, providing a robust solution for infrastructure automation at scale.

In Summary, Docker and Salt serve different purposes in the realm of DevOps, with Docker focusing on containerization for application deployment and scalability, while Salt specializes in infrastructure automation and configuration management.

Docker	Salt
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere	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.
Integrated developer tools; open, portable images; shareable, reusable apps; framework-aware builds; standardized templates; multi-environment support; remote registry management; simple setup for Docker and Kubernetes; certified Kubernetes; application templates; enterprise controls; secure software supply chain; industry-leading container runtime; image scanning; access controls; image signing; caching and mirroring; image lifecycle; policy-based image promotion	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 14.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 5.6K
Stacks 179.0K	Stacks 420
Followers 143.8K	Followers 449
Votes 3.9K	Votes 165
Pros & Cons
Pros 823 Rapid integration and build up 692 Isolation 521 Open source 505 Testability and reproducibility 460 Lightweight Cons 8 New versions == broken features 6 Unreliable networking 6 Documentation not always in sync 4 Moves quickly 3 Not Secure	Pros 47 Flexible 30 Easy 27 Remote execution 24 Enormously flexible 12 Great plugin API Cons 1 No immutable infrastructure 1 Dangerous 1 Bloated
Integrations
Java Docker Compose VirtualBox Linux Amazon EC2 Container Service Docker Swarm boot2docker Kubernetes Docker Machine Vagrant	No integrations available

Docker vs Salt

Overview

Docker vs Salt: What are the differences?

Advice on Docker, Salt

Detailed Comparison

What are some alternatives to Docker, Salt?

Ansible

Chef

Terraform

Capistrano

Puppet Labs

Fabric

LXD

AWS OpsWorks

LXC

cPanel

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