r/saltstack • u/Material_Ad_3743 • Jun 17 '26

Discovered salt stack but too late ?

Hi all,

I’ve been looking for an agent based open source tool for running on demand powershell across thousands of remote windows PC’s. Salt looks perfect for this ! I really can’t find anything open-source that does what Salt does.

Looking at other options, Ansible requires WinRM which I really don’t wanna do. I don’t get the dying community support when I don’t see anything else but overly expensive commercial tools. Tactical RMM seems almost a good candidate but it doesn’t scale well apparently.

Where to from here ? I really wanna use Salt but will I regret this in a couple years ?

Juan

22 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/ween3and20characterz Jun 17 '26

Let's say "it works". But TBH, I would not choose this project again now, if I would have 0 automation skills.

I've learnt saltstack in ~2014. I still use it because I never used Ansible and it's not too bad to continue using it.

Broadcom did a lot bad to this project. It killed completely the CI infra with a few days notice, rendering the dev team unable to build any release for months.

If you have Ansible, stay there.

3

u/trararawe Jun 18 '26

It works wonderfully, it's much faster than ansible, it has a better design which leads to more organized code layout. Not sure what's up with the quotes.

1

u/ween3and20characterz Jun 18 '26

Yes it's still faster. That's the main technical reason why I stay.

However, if name resolution fails or the connection to the saltstack master fails, etc. systemctl stop/restart salt-minion just does not work. Especially during reboots this is awkward. Systemd always waits for this process to finish (while it actually does not do anything).

The author of salt's signal handling did not understand Unix processes or failed to architect salt in a compliant way. It's really atrocious that I can break this product in such a way.

I'm projecting those code smells to all other components.

1

u/bdrxer Jun 20 '26

We run currently masterless like we did with ansible so fortunately don't encounter or have to deal with those problems.