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Comment by b5n | Hacker News Reader

Surprised more people here are not using Salt. Having used both Salt and Ansible, I much prefer Salt, especially when working with larger teams.

When working solo I use Guix, both Guix and Nix are _seriously_ amazing.

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Salt has much nicer configs and feels supeior to Ansible. The main disadvantage that I had with salt was the need to have a salt master server. I read that this is no longer needed but I have not tried it myself. Keeping secrets outside of the repo was not trivial task, ansible has an easy way to encrypt secrets.

Wow really? I tried to learn Salt and it was way too complex. Comparatively Ansible was amazing to learn.

Made worse by the same thing that plagues Homebrew: making up cutesy vocabulary for things. I've been working with computers for a long time, Salt, you can feel free to use Adult Words when describing a thing to me

Shameless plug, i've created a GUI for Salt:

https://alcali.dev

feedback welcome!

What's salt? Any link? I found something called SaltStack but that appears to be enterprise security software.

https://github.com/saltstack/salt

Salt (also known as SaltStack) was right.

> 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.

Thanks!

I'm ultra confused about their marketing btw. Their website doesn't even say it's open source. You have to sign up to "try it now". It's like they don't want customers? Or are people who want to understand what they're buying not the target market, somehow?

For reference, this appears to be the Salt primer: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/system/index.html

Salt the company's marketing is atrocious, Salt the software is great.

I think there is a small subset of users where open source is actually a buying decision

Sure, but understanding what the thing is, that's part of the buying decision right? I have no clue what https://www.saltstack.com/ is about.

How do I get from this:

> Drive IT security into the 21st century. Amplify the impact of your entire SecOps team with global orchestration and automation that remediates security issues in minutes, not weeks.

to "it's a provisioning tool for servers, like ansible but faster"?

The docs landing page have me an easier to grok picture of what it does, purely based on seeing what the doc headers are - https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/

SaltStack is actually a configuration management system, but they're re-characterizing themselves as security management software.

they had a very large presence at RSAC 2020. i was very confused by it. they are not security software. however i suppose there are no “configuration management “ tradeshows

Config Management Camp is the main conference for config management: https://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/

I haven't looked into what they added specifically for the space, but I think a configuration management company at a security trade show makes sense: Configuration management is a very useful tool for various security goals.

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