The Salt Stack daemons has crashed on me numerous times in production and it bleeps up with iptables firewall rules on firewall rule reload.
I think Ansible template code is much more readable and it does not require maintaining agents on the hosts since Ansible only uses SSH.
That said Salt stack modules are readable and easy and its Python based.
Puppet uses weird ordering which requires lots of dependencies to be declared.
This isn't exactly an even comparison -- Ansible has been working on it's SSH implementation for about two years, so it's pretty evolved, and you won't find that elsewhere. By comparison, Salt's implementation is currently a rough sketch, and one they discourage using.
Ansible has a pretty robust implementation that allows sudo and su operations, and is pretty finely tuned for using things like ControlPersist, reports nicely on when passwords being incorrect, and also has a paramiko implementation for older EL platforms where ControlPersist is not available. Doing things like detecting when the SSH-key is not added yet, etc, are also well handled to lock and be able to ask prompts only when needed, etc.
Ansible also features a higher speed 'accelerated mode' that uses SSH for secure key exchange, without relying on in-house crypto. Though the new pipelining features in 1.5 make SSH about as fast as accelerate mode, so that's saying something!
Anyway, we take security very very seriously, which is why we invest so much in having a great SSH implementation.
See also:
http://blog.ansibleworks.com/2013/12/08/the-origins-of-ansib...
http://blog.ansibleworks.com/2013/11/29/ansibles-architectur...
Please don't conflate acknowledging that the ssh implementation is a newly-implemented feature with "discouraging" the use of it. You're better than that.
There's a vibe that salt-ssh is an answer to folks who would use Ansible, and less a feature that Salt has long had on it's list of things that need to be implemented.
Not saying there's any truth to that statement, but that's the vibe I got from the folks I know who use Salt and knew that I preferred Ansible at the time. So while the word "discouraging" is a bit heavy, there's an absence of leadership as to why salt-ssh was developed and when it's appropriate vs. 0mq.
We do have a GUI/REST-API company product that sits on top of Ansible that adds things like role based access control, centralized logging, and so on. This is not an enterprise version of Ansible, but an additional offering.
By making this commercial we can produce a really high quality product by hiring some top notch developers, and can move forward at a faster pace.
There are no proprietary modules for Ansible that we hold back, but enterprise companies do have more stringent requirements for tools and that's where we draw the line.
For many users, Ansible will continue to be all they need, and that's fine with us too!.
For reference, here's information about our commercial product:
Not sure where the confusion about Ansible being not fully opensource comes from. And it's not as though Salt doesn't have enterprise support and tool integration that you can pay for too.
As I noted earlier, conf management has so many facets and reasons for being implemented that no one tool will ever win a battle. Honestly I'm happy to have such a wide open space right now with so many great and open source projects in it. When I started developing web apps 10 years ago, there was nothing that begins to approach the robustness of all four big players in this arena right now.
Thank you to all the hardworking contributors, paid and unpaid, to Puppet, Chef, Salt and Ansible. Thank you!
I also appreciate that there are a number of ways to set things up in Ansible, which makes it easy to write simple playbooks, and easy to write complex ones with multiple roles and branches as well.
At the end of the day, conf management has so many facets that I've learned to stop arguing the merits of one over another and just accept that there are different strokes for different folks.