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Comment by richardfey | Hacker News Reader

I went the other way around instead, from salt(-ssh) to Ansible. I could not bear the slow speed though, so I suggest everyone who hasn't tried yet to use it with Mitogen. I don't think I will ever go back and in fact I expect upstream to eventually adopt it.

Major issues with Salt: lots and lots of bugs and quirks. I have had my fair share of those in Ansible over the years as well, but Salt is just not good enough for my taste. A strong NIH is perceived all over its design.

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I've generally seen the opposite, salt works well multi0-platform, ansible is geared toward the LTS distros. It's extremely easy to get bug fixes into salt, and I've done a few dozen.

The biggest issue I see with ansible is the amount of discipline required to use it well. Junior staff will create non-idempotent plays. I don't really see that with salt, where shelling out is pretty rare (the benefit of NIH?).

SaltStack is famous for their NIH syndrome and various high severity vulnerabilities that have resulted from that.

I've used both Ansible and SaltStack a fair bit and would agree with the parent. In most cases, Ansible w/ Mitogen is the way to go.

SaltStack is really only sanely deployable in a Masterless setup. Also the real secret sauce of SaltStack that almost no one is using it for is its Event Bus & Reactor System to automate maintenance/incident runbooks. There's a ton of untapped potential there.

I always am curious when I see this. I've planned and deployed master setups in two separate 10^4 node count companies now. In my experience the number of hosts doesn't really matter (figuring out an architecture that will work with availability zones etc only takes a couple weeks). The real work is figuring out how to normalize and govern the repos. I haven't seen any sane ansible repo once it's beyond a few senior contributors because it's so easy to do whatever you want. Ansible is the ultimate small business tool, but it works very poorly in large companies.

We're at the 10^4 node count but the team managing it is still at the 10^1 size. That's how, basically. You have to make large investments into automation, code review process and time to make continuous improvements (because things do slip through).

There's style guides, linting, commit checks...

I had never heard of Mitogen and installed it a few minutes ago based on your recommendation. The performance improvement is massive. Much obliged.

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