why saltstack ?

Why SaltStack?

© 2017 SALTSTACKDave Giles – SaltStack solutions consultant

A massive community

Salt Open Source Project

• Salt OSS created in Feb. 2011

• Loosely coupled, powerful system management tools

• Automation for complex, Web-scale infrastructure

• Pervasive adoption

• Tech powered by Salt incl: Juniper, Nutanix, IBM,

Cloudflare, EMC, SUSE, Cisco & dozens more

• 37:1 commit to contributor ratio

• Sticky technology and friendly community

Current Contributors (source: Open Hub)

Salt 729

Docker 580

Puppet 122

2100+ All-time Contributors

4M+ Annual Downloads

75,000+ Commits

GigaOm Structure

Launchpad Winner

2013

Gartner 2013

Cool Vendor in

DevOps

2013

InfoWorld

Technology of

the Year

2014

Recognition & awards

Best of

VMworld

2014

Best of DevOps and

Cloud Management

2015

SaltStack was named to the GitHub Octoverse list in 2012 and

2013 as on of the top-five largest open source projects in the world

Why SaltStack?

The 5 bility’s of Salt:

• Scalability

• Extensibility

• Predictability

• Adaptability

• Heterogeneity (ok, ok, it’s close enough…)

Scalability

• Designed for massive scale

- 20,000 Minions per Master

• Redundant Masters for HA

• Hierarchy for complex management

• Speed

- 0mq / pub-sub / async /parallel

execution

Extensibility

• Modules (400+)

• Grains (metadata)

• Beacons (endpoint watchdog)

• States (configured condition)

All can be modified and easily sent to all minions:

salt \* saltutil.sync_all

Predictability

• Salt is an event-response system

• Beacons emit an event from a watched condition (mem/disk/network/file)

• Reactors take a prescribed action to the condition (reboot, rebuild,

redeploy, destroy)

• Minions can autonomously maintain themselves, instead of Master

initiated checking w/ Minions for conditions.

System Events &

Data

Reactor

Commands

Event Reactor(Master)

Infrastructure Nodes(Minions)

Servers

IoTWindows

Virtual Machines

Containers

Public Cloud

Storage

Hyper-Converged

Networking

Private Cloud

Adaptability

• Easy to use config statements (yaml / jinja / python)

• Prebuilt modules to support 100s of applications

• Powerful API interacts w/ other systems

Heterogeneity

• SaltStack Enterprise 5.0.1

• Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac OS, network devices, IoT

• Centralized RBAC, data aggregation, reporting, eAPI, multiple masters

• Extend and enhance SUSE Manager

Why SaltStack?

The 5 {bilities} of Salt add up to deliver these 3 unique characteristics:

• Not just configuration management

• Easily scale from small to massive, simple to extremely complex

• Predictive orchestration through event-driven automation

why saltstack ?

Software