Puppet Labs vs Salt

Overview

Puppet Labs

Stacks1.3K

Followers793

Votes227

GitHub Stars7.7K

Forks2.2K

Salt

Stacks410

Followers449

Votes165

GitHub Stars14.9K

Forks5.6K

Puppet Labs vs Salt: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Puppet Labs and Salt

Puppet Labs and Salt are both configuration management tools used for managing and automating IT infrastructure. However, there are key differences between the two:

1. Scalability: Puppet Labs is known for its scalability, with the ability to manage thousands of nodes efficiently. On the other hand, Salt is designed to be highly scalable, supporting a much larger number of nodes compared to Puppet Labs.

2. Masterless vs Master/Minion Architecture: Puppet Labs follows a master/agent architecture, where the master controls and manages the agents. In contrast, Salt can be used in both master/agent mode and masterless mode, allowing for more flexibility and decentralized management.

3. Configuration Language: Puppet Labs uses Puppet Language, a declarative language that defines the desired state of config files. In contrast, Salt uses YAML or Pillar files to define configuration states. YAML is known for its simplicity and readability, while Puppet Language offers more advanced features and capabilities.

4. Remote Execution: Salt is known for its powerful remote execution capabilities, providing the ability to run commands on multiple nodes simultaneously. Puppet Labs, on the other hand, does not have built-in remote execution capabilities and relies on external tools for remote execution.

5. Integration with Cloud Services: Puppet Labs offers native integration with popular cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure, allowing for seamless management of cloud-based infrastructure. Salt also provides integration with cloud services, but its support may be more limited compared to Puppet Labs.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Puppet Labs has a larger community and ecosystem compared to Salt, with a wide range of modules and resources available for automation. While Salt also has an active community, it may have fewer available modules and resources compared to Puppet Labs.

In summary, Puppet Labs excels in scalability, native integration with cloud services, and a larger community and ecosystem, while Salt offers more flexibility in its architecture, powerful remote execution capabilities, and a simpler configuration language.

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Advice on Puppet Labs, Salt

Rogério

Software Developer

Aug 10, 2021

Needs adviceon

Docker

Git

Linux

Personal Dotfiles management

Given that they are all “configuration management” tools - meaning they are designed to deploy, configure and manage servers - what would be the simplest - and yet robust - solution to manage personal dotfiles - for n00bs.

Ideally, I reckon, it should:

be containerized (@{Docker}|tool:586|?)
be versionable (@{Git}|tool:1046|)
ensure idempotency
allow full automation (tests, CI/CD, etc.)
be fully recoverable (@{Linux}|tool:10483|/ @{macOS}|tool:5560|)
be easier to setup/manage (as much as possible)

Does it make sense?

282k views282k

Comments

Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

329k views329k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Puppet Labs	Salt
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.	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.
Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.;Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.;Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.;Configuration Management- Puppet Enterprise's declarative, model-based approach automates repetitive tasks and eliminates configuration drift. You define the desired state of your infrastructure, and Puppet Enterprise enforces this state, freeing you to work on tougher projects.;Orchestration- Quickly deploy critical updates, like security patches, across hundreds of servers in seconds, or proactively initiate Puppet runs to update configurations and report changes. Puppet Enterprise allows you to orchestrate controlled, multi-step operations to targeted collections of nodes, giving you complete control over infrastructure changes.;Reporting- Get visibility into your infrastructure, browse resources, and view reports that help you manage your configuration. Puppet Enterprise provides node hardware and software inventory, Puppet run change reports, and node configuration graphs via the product's console or 3rd party APIs.	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 7.7K	GitHub Stars 14.9K
GitHub Forks 2.2K	GitHub Forks 5.6K
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 410
Followers 793	Followers 449
Votes 227	Votes 165
Pros & Cons
Pros 52 Devops 44 Automate it 26 Reusable components 21 Dynamic and idempotent server configuration 18 Great community Cons 3 Steep learning curve 1 Customs types idempotence	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 Puppet Labs, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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.

Related Comparisons

Puppet Labs vs Salt: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Puppet Labs and Salt

Puppet Labs and Salt are both configuration management tools used for managing and automating IT infrastructure. However, there are key differences between the two:

Puppet Labs vs Salt

Overview

Puppet Labs vs Salt: What are the differences?