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I get your sentiment. I only started using Salt some months ago, but it was really a breath of fresh air compared to Puppet. However it took me a while to reali

by ymse 10y ago

I get your sentiment. I only started using Salt some months ago, but it was really a breath of fresh air compared to Puppet. However it took me a while to realize its true strengths since the documentation is very...dry. IIRC Ansible, like Chef, does serial execution. That is, states are applied in the order they are written. I think that's part of the reason it has gotten so popular, as you'll have very few surprises in the vein of "what do you mean there is no ntp_service -- it's right there next to the config declaration!". What Salt got right is the pillar, for which the Puppet equivalent (Hiera) was an afterthought. The Salt engine allows you to generate states from the pillar, rather than making poor clones of Puppet modules (as most of the formulas I've seen online). However that flexibility is not documented anywhere, nor part of best practices. Nevertheless I'm about to release a set of formulas that are truly pillar-driven with no hard-coded stuff. Keep an eye out for the accompanying blog post :) Of course, if you don't care about data/code separation and just want to get stuff done, there are better tools. And if you have full control of your environment, I would strongly suggest using Guix and/or Nix rather than these legacy configuration management tools.

bpchaps 10y ago
I actually really like salt, just not its documentation. Like you said - it was a breath of fresh air. :) Last time I used it a few months ago, it was while helping out another admin. He had a lot of confusion on how to do certain things, and the documentation wasn't very helpful for either of us. The solution came from github, which has become my go-to for these sorts of tools. Though, that could easily be supplemented with some better examples on their site, or in their, erm, man page. I doubt we'll have some great tools with great documentation anytime soon (or monitoring tools!), but a sysadmin can dream... :)

by ymse 10y ago

bpchaps 10y ago

I actually really like salt, just not its documentation. Like you said - it was a breath of fresh air. :) Last time I used it a few months ago, it was while helping out another admin. He had a lot of confusion on how to do certain things, and the documentation wasn't very helpful for either of us. The solution came from github, which has become my go-to for these sorts of tools. Though, that could easily be supplemented with some better examples on their site, or in their, erm, man page. I doubt we'll have some great tools with great documentation anytime soon (or monitoring tools!), but a sysadmin can dream... :)