My experiences with Saltstack and Ansible are inverted - I realise the comparison was only a casual aside in TFA, but the 'Ansible executed the idea better than

My experiences with Saltstack and Ansible are inverted - I realise the comparison was only a casual aside in TFA, but the 'Ansible executed the idea better than Saltstack' comment invites so many questions, especially in the context of an article that dwells on how unpleasant Ansible is. Ansible certainly defaults to slow, and I never got into the weeds for performance tuning it, but Saltstack felt fast, especially the example of 'install package foo' which he anticipated takes 15 minutes to run against one of his VMs using Ansible. I agree, that sounds unpleasant. Others have noted the slight confusion about state (and where that state is or should be maintained), and certainly writing idempotent salt or ansible recipes takes some thought, just as writing performant recipes does. The 'have to rewrite everything' whenever Ansible releases a new feature doesn't sound right - perhaps I misunderstand the problem described there. Author mentions apt, but ultimately sounds like they wanted something more container-y than a fat VM running a full GNU/Linux distro with managed packages + config files. In that light, the mention of Hashicorp - specifically Terraform & Nomad - felt tantalisingly prescient.