From the article: > Chef works atop ssh, which – while the gold standard for cryptographically secure systems management – is computationally expensive to the

From the article: > Chef works atop ssh, which – while the gold standard for cryptographically secure systems management – is computationally expensive to the point where most master servers fall over under the weight of 700-1500 clients. Salt’s approach was far simpler. I think I'm with you (without the experience): I find "it works over ssh" a lot simpler than "we wrote a custom protocol on 0mq." Simplicity apparently has lots of interpretations. I couldn't care less if ssh performs well enough to support a trillion connections. In practice, you only need a handful, usually one. Maybe Salt is fantastic. I'm not really in a position to judge. The article made it sound interesting to me, but I'm not sure attacking Chef/Puppet was really necessary, especially since it wasn't really expounded on.