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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Fabric vs Salt

Fabric vs Salt

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Fabric
Fabric
Stacks494
Followers307
Votes75
GitHub Stars15.3K
Forks2.0K
Salt
Salt
Stacks410
Followers449
Votes165
GitHub Stars14.9K
Forks5.6K

Fabric vs Salt: What are the differences?

  1. Programming Language: Fabric is written in Python, while Salt is written in a combination of Python and ZeroMQ. This difference in programming languages can impact developers' ease of use, familiarity, and flexibility in customization.

  2. Architecture: Fabric follows a masterless architecture, where commands are run in a linear sequence on remote nodes, making it simpler for small setups. In contrast, Salt follows a master-slave architecture, allowing for more complex configurations, such as managing thousands of machines from a central location.

  3. Scalability: Salt is designed to scale efficiently due to its master-slave architecture, making it suitable for large-scale infrastructures with numerous nodes. Fabric, being masterless, may face scalability challenges when managing a large number of machines simultaneously, leading to potential performance issues.

  4. Extensibility: Salt provides more extensive built-in functionality and modules compared to Fabric, offering a broader range of features for configuration management, remote execution, and orchestration tasks. This makes Salt a more comprehensive solution for managing diverse infrastructure setups.

  5. Community Support: Fabric has a smaller community compared to Salt, resulting in potentially slower bug fixes, updates, and a smaller pool of resources and tutorials available. Salt, with its larger community base, offers more extensive support, documentation, and community-contributed modules.

  6. Learning Curve: Fabric is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a preferred choice for straightforward deployment tasks. On the other hand, Salt's multi-faceted architecture and extensive feature set may result in a steeper learning curve for users, requiring more time and effort to become proficient in its usage.

In Summary, Fabric and Salt differ in their programming languages, architectures, scalability, extensibility, community support, and learning curve, impacting their suitability for various infrastructure management needs.

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Detailed Comparison

Fabric
Fabric
Salt
Salt

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

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.

Lets you execute arbitrary Python functions via the command line;Library of subroutines (built on top of a lower-level library) to make executing shell commands over SSH easy and Pythonic
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
15.3K
GitHub Stars
14.9K
GitHub Forks
2.0K
GitHub Forks
5.6K
Stacks
494
Stacks
410
Followers
307
Followers
449
Votes
75
Votes
165
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 23
    Python
  • 21
    Simple
  • 5
    Installation feedback for Twitter App Cards
  • 5
    Low learning curve, from bash script to Python power
  • 3
    Easy on maintainance
Pros
  • 47
    Flexible
  • 30
    Easy
  • 27
    Remote execution
  • 24
    Enormously flexible
  • 12
    Great plugin API
Cons
  • 1
    No immutable infrastructure
  • 1
    Dangerous
  • 1
    Bloated

What are some alternatives to Fabric, Salt?

Ansible

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.

Chef

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.

Terraform

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.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

cPanel

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Puppet Bolt

Puppet Bolt

It is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure. Use it to automate tasks that you perform on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow.

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