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Salt

An event-driven automation and configuration management framework.

Salt (formerly SaltStack) uses ZeroMQ-based messaging between a master and minions to push commands and configuration changes in seconds, even across thousands of nodes. The reactive engine can also drive workflows in response to events — cluster auto-scaling, service self-healing, and similar use cases. Configuration is in YAML with embedded Jinja templating.

Thomas Hatch started Salt in 2011 to scratch the itch of an admin who needed to manage many servers and found existing tools too slow or too cumbersome. SaltStack the company was acquired by VMware in 2020, and through Broadcom's later VMware acquisition the project is now under the Tanzu portfolio.

Salt's distinctive trait is speed: a salt '*' cmd.run uptime across a thousand minions completes in a second or two, and the event-driven react system makes it possible to build self-healing infrastructure without polling. Adoption has shifted toward Ansible for many traditional config management use cases, but Salt remains entrenched at organisations with very large fleets.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install salt-master salt-minion
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install salt-master salt-minion
Arch:          sudo pacman -S salt