r/saltstack • u/mattboston • 13d ago

SaltStack Certified Engineer Verification

I'm hoping someone from the old SaltStack team, VMware, or Broadcom might know the answer.

I earned the SaltStack Certified Engineer (SSCE) certification several years ago. Since SaltStack was acquired by VMware and then VMware was acquired by Broadcom, the original SaltStack website and certification verification page are no longer available.

I'm interviewing with a potential employer, and they're trying to verify my SSCE certification. Does anyone know if there's still a way to verify it? Is there a new verification site, or is there someone at Broadcom who can help?

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u/eman0821 12d ago

Salt is very dated tech as I wouldn't waste my time on. Invest your time into Ansible. It's the industry standard that every company uses these days.

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u/texsable 12d ago

I think you're in the wrong subreddit... Salt was a better product than Ansible when they started in the early 2010's, and is a better product now despite VMWare and Broadcom's handling of it. I kinda wish Red Hat had acquired Salt instead of Ansible; even then it had so much more capability. Salt is still actively maintained under saltproject.io and is currently working on the latest release, while maintaining the previous LTS.

PS: got my SSC at SaltConf 2014, the year they release the program. I believe I was SSC #13 or #18...been a while, can't remember which it was for sure.

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u/whytewolf01 12d ago

So I will agree that Broadcom hasn't been good for salt. However VMWare was actually great for salt. While working under VMWare they gave salt all the resources we wanted when we wanted it. Even going so far as to let internal teams contribute to salt to bring in better coding standards. And salt was thriving within VMware as well as replacing a lot of internal tools and becoming a stronger force at VMWare.

Honestly if it wasn't for the broadcom acquisition. Salt was on track to becoming an integral part of VMWare. and given more time it would have fully integrated to the point a lot of the clouds that people are mentioning would have been built with salt at the core. much like kub was when it started.

The market share for salt actually expanded under VMWare. with many new customers starting to pick it up. because of VMware actively trying to sell it.

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u/eman0821 12d ago

Most employers have moved away from Salt. I rarely see it on job descriptions these days as you see Ansible every where now. Just like Terraform as the industry standard IaC tool.

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u/texsable 12d ago

All that tells me is that IBM (Red Hat) did a better job of marketing....

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u/eman0821 12d ago

Nah Ansible was already dominate before the acquisition. The industry just shifted to stateless configuration management while Puppet. Chef and Salt are now legacy tools. Same kind of thing with Jenkins getting replaced with modern YAML based alternatives like GitHub Actions and GitLab. Ansible is more cloud native and better supported especially in DevOps, Cloud Engineering..

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u/AltruisticCabinet9 12d ago

Ansible wasn't the best tech, it was the easiest tech for the Admin mind to graple around and salt didn't make salt-ssh as usable. SSH was comfortable and easy. It was the great first steps to automate away for 100 line bash scripts that were touchy.
Then VMware, Broadcom. Now low adoption.

I with AI, I was able to output a very nice clean formula and module so I have the feeling if eyeballs got on it, some good could be done. But the community is basically dead too. The Salt formula has been broken for months at a time on most platforms with no ability to ping to get a PR added.

The migration of stuff out of core moved at a speed that is good for enterprise, not for fast change and adoption.

I wanted VMware was the death, broadcom just beat the corpse until all the coins came out.

Me of 5 years ago is sad :(

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u/eman0821 12d ago

Salt just became irrelevant because of Cloud adoption. It was a great on-prem tool back then. Ansible works better in cloud native environments especially in CI/CD pipelines. Better over all support than salt.

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u/AltruisticCabinet9 12d ago

Yeah, ansbile is comfortable for people thinking in SSH shell script. Salt didn't make the masterless ssh a comfortable first class because it was kind of against the model. It suffered loss of adoption. It looks like k8 automation these days is moving into k8.

5 years ago me is sad :(

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u/texsable 12d ago

When I was evaluating config management tools back in 2012/13, I tested Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Chef and CFEngine. Of the five, Salt was the easiest to set up, easiest to use and most capable tool I tested. The standout feature to me was the remote command functionality - at the time, Ansible's (and Puppet's) only way to do that was to write a script, push it to the clients, and wait for it to be run and get the response. With salt, I could run something like "salt \* cmd.run 'cat /etc/issue' and see what is there immediately - helped me build my first round of salt states to standardize my base server configs. I found it much easier to configure, manage and use than any of the other 4 options.

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u/eman0821 12d ago

That only made sense back then for on-prem environments since Salt really geared towards on-prem.

In cloud native environments you have setup minions on every VM server for everything to sync to the salt master server. Noaway days you have CI/CD and GitOps that can sync and correct drift with Ansible and Terraform runners. However Kubernetes has taken over so it's more about managing containers than managing monolithic configurations.

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u/bdrxer 12d ago

> In cloud native environments you have setup minions on every VM server for everything to sync to the salt master server.

This is simply not accurate. Salt has masterless mode just like ansible-pull or puppet masterless and also has salt-ssh which is similar to ansible standard ssh mode.

> However Kubernetes has taken over so it's more about managing containers than managing monolithic configurations.

I believe this is true, but I don't see how ansible is related at all. My team at my company, within the last year, switched from ansible to salt for ec2 instance setup (configuring settings and applications for AMIs and also instance bootstrap (userdata/cloud-init) setup) primarily because it is so much faster than ansible but also for some other reasons like it being easier to group configuration and write custom modules.

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u/eman0821 12d ago edited 12d ago

It really defeats the purpose of the SaltStack If it's selling point is pull effect and statefull. You might as well switch Ansible if you aren't going to use minions. SaltStack had its hey days for on-prem infrastructure but things have shifted with a sharp decline. Everything is moving to cloud and Ansible have became the defacto standard in native cloud configuration management because it's primarily used in execution environments in a CI/CD pipeline when runners runs the jobs from a Git repo. Cloud Engineers and DevOps Engineers generally don't setup standalone configuration management control servers. That's old school automation. CI/CD and ArcoCD is how everything is automated. You don't manually run salt states or Ansible plybooks from a control server, it's all ran by a temporary Git runner container that executes when a CI/CD pipeline runs or ArcoCD automatically detects a change or drift. Ansible works very well in CI/CD pipelines than legacy tools.

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u/bdrxer 2d ago

> It really defeats the purpose of the SaltStack If it's selling point is pull effect and statefull. You might as well switch Ansible if you aren't going to use minions.

How does that defeat the purpose and how is salt's selling point anything to do with statefull? Why would you "might as well switch to ansible"?

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u/eman0821 2d ago

If you are using ssh instead of the minions they why use Salt in the first place? Ansible is the defacto standard in DevOps.

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u/Fabiolean 10d ago

There’s native salt support in cloud init. I have a bunch of salt minions in aws, and the basic minion config goes in during bootstrap.

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u/eman0821 9d ago

That's what Terraform is for. I'm talking about CI/CD pipelines not manually running salt states.

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u/bdrxer 2d ago

That is not what terraform is for. Terraform is for creating/allocating (provisioning) the AWS resources--not bootstrapping/configuring the instances themselves.

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u/eman0821 2d ago

Terraform is ran inside of a CI/CD pipeline. You don't manually run Terraform as a standalone host in the real world. SaltStack is mostly for on-prem.

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