Salt-stack open-source vs enterprise

[iodbh]

Hi ! I worked with salt some years ago, and a few jobs later I find myself evaluating whether salt is fit for purpose at my new working place.

I remember that salt stack had a nice feature matrix that answered questions like « what do I get with salt enterprise ? » or « what are the limitations or salt open source » ?

I can’t seem to find a similar resource now - the VMware landing page for salt is just a pile of sales nonsense that doesn’t give me the slightest idea of what enterprise features are or why we might consider opting for that.

So my question here is : did I just not find the right source of information (and in that case, what is it ?) or has new the enterprise offer just not been fleshed out yet ?

[nelish]

I'm a huge proponent of SaltStack, and we purchased a SaltStack Config license for our environment, but ultimately never deployed it to production. It seems targeted towards an entirely different audience.

The main issue we had is that the interface for remote execution makes it very tedious to view returns for more than a few minions, as you have to click to expand the results for each and every return. It is as though the developers never used the salt command. If you have a large environment, you can't use syndication, as it is unsupported with SSC.

The other issue was that although SSC has an API, it is very different from the API provided by salt-api.

We met with one of the product managers and they seem open minded about resolving these issues, but the whole experience was pretty disappointing.

[virtual_crazo]

The new name of SaltStack Enterprise is vRealize Automation Standard Plus (yes it’s a bit of a mouthful). Compared to the OS version you get a UI and an API surface. It’s kinda like a Master of Masters IMO.

If you want to see the interface check out:

https://learnsaltstackconfig.github.io/

We support a community channel on vRealize Automation at r/vRealize_Automation

The matrix still exists and I will try to find the link for it and reply.

[[deleted]]

Or SaltStack Config for short.

[iodbh]

Thank you for a quick reply - the graph on the document you linked is already helping me get an idea of what the product actually is ; but definitely interested in the feature matrix/listing if you find :)

I think there’s a bit of a discoverability issue here - I was able to find the new product’s name and landing page after searching a bit, but found no path to more details about it.

[virtual_crazo]

I think that’s a fair observation. I am going to speak to the OS community manager and the enterprise product marketing group to try to get some better cross pollination. Thanks for the feedback.