SaltStack vs RUDDER

Salt has an impressive welcoming and active community of users. There are user groups all over the world (Stockhom, Silicon Valley, Paris, and lots more), and an active live chat.

Salt's configuration files and setups are organized into YAML files. This makes them very easy to read and understand since YAML is considered very readable.

Salt can run agentless just like ansible, allowing it to manage devices that you can't run an agent on (routers/switches, etc).

Salt can communicate with clients through agents called minions, or through SSH.

With Salt you can have multiple layers of masters which result in an arrangement which distributes load and increases redundancy. Upstream masters can then control downstream masters and their minions.

Salt has support for Windows, Linux and Unix. Though it's fair to say that it's easier to use and it's more useful in Unix and Linux systems.

Salt works around a Salt master which has multiple agents (Salt minions) that have a persistent connection to the master. Because of this persistent connection, commands to the master are fast to reach the minions. Furthermore, the minions also save various data to the cache in order to make execution faster.

When compared against other tools to run the same actions, Salt almost always completes the actions in significantly less time.

Rudder checks every rule that has been set up to keep it compliant over time. It is a tool made to be used in production. It's not a dev tool where there is no continuity constraint.

There is 3 ways to use Rudder. The biggest surprise is that everything that can be done with code is also possible with the web interface, without knowing anything about development or automation, generally speaking.

The agent has nearly no impact concerning resources and that is the reason why Rudder is able to manage thousands of servers without any performance issues.

Non-expert users can define parameters in a central interface, and Rudder will automatically make sure that IT services are installed, configured, running and in good health. All actions (checks, warnings, fixed errors…) are reported upon immediately in the user interface, keeping drift from nominal behaviour low.

Apart the agent on proprietary OS (AIX, Windows, ...) , Rudder is an open source and free software. This means that the code source is available on Github for every part of Rudder (Rudder webapp, and every other Normation repository). This also means that packages for a wide range of distributions are released and available to download freely.

Rudder can manage quite everything. So far only HP-UX and iOS don't have their own agent version, but everything else is available already.