SaltStack is a high-speed platform for provisioning and controlling distributed computing resources. Salt Cloud is a configuration management tool that allows users to provision systems on cloud hosts or hypervisors. During installation, Salt Cloud installs Salt on all provisioned systems by default. This enables the user to put systems into the desired state during provisioning.

Salt was released in November 2011 and LinkedIn dev teams were the first major early adopter.

Salt is a configuration management engine to provide idempotent application of machine states to those hosts.

I became aware of Salt via The Hacks: a nerdy podcast hosted by Salt's founder Thomas Hatch and Jimmy Chonga, a tech newbie and former morning radio host.

Being a software and fullstack web dev, I've asked a devops pro about Salt and he told be it's 'based'. He had experience with it by helping an organization setup their infrastructure and he was pleased with the product.

SaltStack makes software for complex systems management at scale. SaltStack is the company that created and maintains the Salt Open project and develops and sells SaltStack Enterprise software, services and support. 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 is a new approach to infrastructure management built on a dynamic communication bus. Salt can be used for data-driven orchestration, remote execution for any infrastructure, configuration management for any app stack, and much more.

Salt viable alternatives are Chef, Puppet, and Ansible.

However, adopters usually become die-hard fans of the product. One CTO stresses Salt was the best product to manage his large scale Windows Server based infrastructure. Easy maintenance is guaranteed mainly thru "a good reporting mechanism that allows one to easily view all operations".

When compared to competitors, Salt is the way to go if scalability and resilience is the most important concern for your organization.

sources

https://github.com/saltstack/salt

Chef vs Puppet vs Ansible vs Saltstack | Configuration Management Tools | DevOps Tools | Simplilearn

Configure and Use Salt Cloud and Cloud Maps to Provision Systems

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Salt_(software)

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Infrastructure_as_code

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/ZeroMQ