Keywhiz vs Salt

Keywhiz vs Salt: What are the differences?

Keywhiz: A system for distributing and managing secrets. Keywhiz is a secret management and distribution service that is now available for everyone. Keywhiz helps us with infrastructure secrets, including TLS certificates and keys, GPG keyrings, symmetric keys, database credentials, API tokens, and SSH keys for external services — and even some non-secrets like TLS trust stores. Automation with Keywhiz allows us to seamlessly distribute and generate the necessary secrets for our services, which provides a consistent and secure environment, and ultimately helps us ship faster; Salt: Fast, scalable and flexible software for data center automation. 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..

Keywhiz belongs to "Secrets Management" category of the tech stack, while Salt can be primarily classified under "Server Configuration and Automation".

Some of the features offered by Keywhiz are:

• Keywhiz Server provides JSON APIs for accessing and managing secrets. It is written in Java and based on Dropwizard.
• KeywhizFs is a FUSE-based file system, providing secrets as if they are files in a directory. Transparently, secrets are retrieved from a Keywhiz Server using mTLS with a client certificate.
• Presenting secrets as files makes Keywhiz compatible with nearly all software. Outside of Keywhiz administration, consumers of secrets only have to know how to read a file.

On the other hand, Salt provides the following key 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.

Keywhiz and Salt are both open source tools. It seems that Salt with 10.1K GitHub stars and 4.59K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Keywhiz with 2.09K GitHub stars and 166 GitHub forks.