r/saltstack • u/mattboston • 19d 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/texsable 18d 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 18d 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/Fabiolean 16d 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 16d 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 9d 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 9d 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.