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

Nomad vs Salt

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Salt
Salt
Stacks410
Followers449
Votes165
GitHub Stars14.9K
Forks5.6K
Nomad
Nomad
Stacks256
Followers344
Votes32
GitHub Stars15.9K
Forks2.0K

Nomad vs Salt: What are the differences?

What is Nomad? A cluster manager and scheduler. Nomad is a cluster manager, designed for both long lived services and short lived batch processing workloads. Developers use a declarative job specification to submit work, and Nomad ensures constraints are satisfied and resource utilization is optimized by efficient task packing. Nomad supports all major operating systems and virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications.

What is 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..

Nomad can be classified as a tool in the "Cluster Management" category, while Salt is grouped under "Server Configuration and Automation".

Nomad 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 Nomad with 4.93K GitHub stars and 893 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Salt has a broader approval, being mentioned in 110 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to Nomad, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Salt
Salt
Nomad
Nomad

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.

Nomad is a cluster manager, designed for both long lived services and short lived batch processing workloads. Developers use a declarative job specification to submit work, and Nomad ensures constraints are satisfied and resource utilization is optimized by efficient task packing. Nomad supports all major operating systems and virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications.

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.
Handles the scheduling and upgrading of the applications over time; With built-in dry-run execution, Nomad shows what scheduling decisions it will take before it takes them. Operators can approve or deny these changes to create a safe and reproducible workflow; Nomad runs applications and ensures they keep running in failure scenarios. In addition to long-running services, Nomad can schedule batch jobs, distributed cron jobs, and parameterized jobs; Stream logs, send signals, and interact with the file system of scheduled applications. These operator-friendly commands bring the familiar debugging tools to a scheduled world
Statistics
GitHub Stars
14.9K
GitHub Stars
15.9K
GitHub Forks
5.6K
GitHub Forks
2.0K
Stacks
410
Stacks
256
Followers
449
Followers
344
Votes
165
Votes
32
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 47
    Flexible
  • 30
    Easy
  • 27
    Remote execution
  • 24
    Enormously flexible
  • 12
    Great plugin API
Cons
  • 1
    No immutable infrastructure
  • 1
    Dangerous
  • 1
    Bloated
Pros
  • 7
    Built in Consul integration
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 4
    Bult-in Vault integration
  • 3
    Built-in federation support
  • 2
    Autoscaling support
Cons
  • 3
    Easy to start with
  • 1
    Small comunity
  • 1
    HCL language for configuration, an unpopular DSL
Integrations
No integrations available
Consul
Consul
Docker
Docker
Vault
Vault

What are some alternatives to Salt, Nomad?

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.

Fabric

Fabric

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.

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

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that simplifies the complexity of running applications on a shared pool of servers.

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.

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