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Puppet Labs vs Salt: What are the differences?
Puppet Labs: Server automation framework and application. 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; Salt: Fast, scalable and flexible software for data center automation. 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..
Puppet Labs and Salt belong to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Puppet Labs are:
- Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.
- Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.
- Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.
On the other hand, Salt provides the following key features:
- 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.
"Devops" is the top reason why over 45 developers like Puppet Labs, while over 41 developers mention "Flexible" as the leading cause for choosing Salt.
Puppet Labs and Salt are both open source tools. It seems that Salt with 10.1K GitHub stars and 4.59K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Puppet Labs with 5.37K GitHub stars and 2.1K GitHub forks.
Uber Technologies, Twitch, and PayPal are some of the popular companies that use Puppet Labs, whereas Salt is used by Lyft, LinkedIn, and Robinhood. Puppet Labs has a broader approval, being mentioned in 180 company stacks & 49 developers stacks; compared to Salt, which is listed in 110 company stacks and 20 developer stacks.
Personal Dotfiles management
Given that they are all “configuration management” tools - meaning they are designed to deploy, configure and manage servers - what would be the simplest - and yet robust - solution to manage personal dotfiles - for n00bs.
Ideally, I reckon, it should:
- be containerized (Docker?)
- be versionable (Git)
- ensure idempotency
- allow full automation (tests, CI/CD, etc.)
- be fully recoverable (Linux/ macOS)
- be easier to setup/manage (as much as possible)
Does it make sense?
I recommend whatever you are most comfortable with/whatever might already be installed in the system. Note that, for personal dotfiles, it does not need to be containerized or have full automation/testing. It just needs to handle multiple OS and platform and be idempotent. Git will handle the heavy lifting. Note that you'll have to separate out certain files like the private SSH keys and write your CM so that it will pull it from another store or assist in manually importing them.
I personally use Ansible since it is a serverless design and is in Python, which I prefer to Ruby. Saltstack was too new when I started to port my dotfile management scripts from shell into a configuration management tool. I think any of the above is fine.
You should check out SaltStack. It's a lot more powerful than Puppet, Chef, & Ansible. If not Salt, then I would go Ansible. But stay away from Puppet & Chef. 10+ year user of Puppet, and 2+ year user of Chef.
Chef is a definite no-go for me. I learned it the hard way (ie. got a few tasks in a prod system) and it took quite a lot to grasp it on an acceptable level. Ansible in turn is much more straightforward and much easier to test.
I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)
I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.
The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.
I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.
The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.
If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate
Pros of Puppet Labs
- Devops51
- Automate it44
- Reusable components26
- Dynamic and idempotent server configuration21
- Great community18
- Very scalable12
- Cloud management12
- Easy to maintain10
- Free tier9
- Works with Amazon EC26
- Declarative4
- Ruby4
- Works with Azure3
- Works with OpenStack3
- Nginx2
- Ease of use1
Pros of Salt
- Flexible46
- Easy30
- Remote execution27
- Enormously flexible24
- Great plugin API12
- Python10
- Extensible5
- Scalable3
- nginx2
- Vagrant provisioner1
- HipChat1
- Best IaaC1
- Automatisation1
- Parallel Execution1
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Cons of Puppet Labs
- Steep learning curve3
- Customs types idempotence1
Cons of Salt
- Bloated1
- Dangerous1
- No immutable infrastructure1
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