Docker vs Salt

Overview

Docker

Stacks194.2K

Followers143.8K

Votes3.9K

Salt

Stacks410

Followers449

Votes165

GitHub Stars14.9K

Forks5.6K

Docker vs Salt: What are the differences?

Isolation: Docker focuses on creating isolated containers that encapsulate applications and their dependencies, ensuring consistency and portability across different environments. On the other hand, Salt is more geared towards configuration management and automation, allowing for efficient management of infrastructure and network devices.
Purpose: Docker is primarily used for packaging and deploying applications in lightweight, portable containers, making it easy to scale and manage distributed applications. In contrast, Salt is designed for orchestrating infrastructure, automating configuration changes, and ensuring uniformity across servers and devices in a network.
Architecture: Docker follows a client-server architecture where Docker Engine manages containers and images, while Salt utilizes a master-minion architecture where the Salt master controls and communicates with Salt minions on target systems. This distinction affects how tasks are executed and managed within each system.
Ease of Use: Docker provides a user-friendly interface and commands for managing containers, images, and networks, making it accessible to developers and system administrators. Salt, on the other hand, requires a deeper understanding of configuration files, states, and pillars to effectively automate and manage infrastructure, which may have a steeper learning curve.
Community Support: Docker boasts a large community of users and contributors, leading to a wealth of resources, plugins, and integrations that enhance its capabilities. Salt also has a strong community backing, with a focus on infrastructure automation, networking, and cloud orchestration, providing support for a wide range of use cases and environments.
Scalability: Docker excels in containerization and scaling applications horizontally, allowing for efficient resource utilization and deployment in microservices architectures. In contrast, Salt is more suited for managing configurations and enforcing policies across a large number of servers or network devices, providing a robust solution for infrastructure automation at scale.

In Summary, Docker and Salt serve different purposes in the realm of DevOps, with Docker focusing on containerization for application deployment and scalability, while Salt specializes in infrastructure automation and configuration management.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Docker, Salt

Florian

IT DevOp at Agitos GmbH

Oct 22, 2019

Decided

lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.

483k views483k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Docker	Salt
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere	Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.
Integrated developer tools; open, portable images; shareable, reusable apps; framework-aware builds; standardized templates; multi-environment support; remote registry management; simple setup for Docker and Kubernetes; certified Kubernetes; application templates; enterprise controls; secure software supply chain; industry-leading container runtime; image scanning; access controls; image signing; caching and mirroring; image lifecycle; policy-based image promotion	Remote execution is the core function of Salt. Running pre-defined or arbitrary commands on remote hosts.;Salt modules are the core of remote execution. They provide functionality such as installing packages, restarting a service, running a remote command, transferring files, and infinitely more;Building on the remote execution core is a robust and flexible configuration management framework. Execution happens on the minions allowing effortless, simultaneous configuration of tens of thousands of hosts.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 14.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 5.6K
Stacks 194.2K	Stacks 410
Followers 143.8K	Followers 449
Votes 3.9K	Votes 165
Pros & Cons
Pros 823 Rapid integration and build up 692 Isolation 521 Open source 505 Testability and reproducibility 460 Lightweight Cons 8 New versions == broken features 6 Unreliable networking 6 Documentation not always in sync 4 Moves quickly 3 Not Secure	Pros 47 Flexible 30 Easy 27 Remote execution 24 Enormously flexible 12 Great plugin API Cons 1 No immutable infrastructure 1 Dangerous 1 Bloated
Integrations
Java Docker Compose VirtualBox Linux Amazon EC2 Container Service Docker Swarm boot2docker Kubernetes Docker Machine Vagrant	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Docker, Salt?

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

LXD

LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

LXC

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Related Comparisons

Docker vs Salt: What are the differences?

Isolation: Docker focuses on creating isolated containers that encapsulate applications and their dependencies, ensuring consistency and portability across different environments. On the other hand, Salt is more geared towards configuration management and automation, allowing for efficient management of infrastructure and network devices.
Purpose: Docker is primarily used for packaging and deploying applications in lightweight, portable containers, making it easy to scale and manage distributed applications. In contrast, Salt is designed for orchestrating infrastructure, automating configuration changes, and ensuring uniformity across servers and devices in a network.
Architecture: Docker follows a client-server architecture where Docker Engine manages containers and images, while Salt utilizes a master-minion architecture where the Salt master controls and communicates with Salt minions on target systems. This distinction affects how tasks are executed and managed within each system.
Ease of Use: Docker provides a user-friendly interface and commands for managing containers, images, and networks, making it accessible to developers and system administrators. Salt, on the other hand, requires a deeper understanding of configuration files, states, and pillars to effectively automate and manage infrastructure, which may have a steeper learning curve.
Community Support: Docker boasts a large community of users and contributors, leading to a wealth of resources, plugins, and integrations that enhance its capabilities. Salt also has a strong community backing, with a focus on infrastructure automation, networking, and cloud orchestration, providing support for a wide range of use cases and environments.
Scalability: Docker excels in containerization and scaling applications horizontally, allowing for efficient resource utilization and deployment in microservices architectures. In contrast, Salt is more suited for managing configurations and enforcing policies across a large number of servers or network devices, providing a robust solution for infrastructure automation at scale.

Docker vs Salt

Overview