SaltStack
Recently, SaltStack, the company I co-founded in 2012, was acquired by VMware. Our mission at SaltStack was to enact change through a unique, distributed work model and lightning-fast event bus architecture across many verticals and product suites. Utilizing CIS-certified scans and automated remediations, it allows IT and security teams to proactively identify compliance issues. Now that we’ve become proud members of the VMware family, “SaltStack Config” as it’s now called is simple, integrated and a natural evolutionary step that provides streamlined onboarding with faster and more efficient multi-cloud coordination from the infrastructure to the application.
SaltStack Config is based on my original open source project, Salt. As a behind-the-scenes cog, it ultimately simplifies the human interaction with cloud based services. Extremely complex IoT network infrastructure supporting hundreds of thousands of nodes can be managed and optimized by SaltStack Config. Moving forward, fewer people will be responsible for more levels of software management that is multiplying at scale as new service technologies come online.
Salt
Salt is an open source project that provides automation for configuration management of any software infrastructure application at scale. Salt moves beyond configuration management and into broad based automation such as remote execution, event reactor systems and complex event processing. The key value in Salt, as in most open source projects, is that the cooperative development team doesn’t get bogged down in the belief of a single panacea – the group consensus is flexible in the delivery of true innovation. The Salt Open Community is a vibrant, and diverse group that harnesses the multi-faceted pathways to innovation in the Salt project and all the subsequent supporting projects such as Pop, Tiamat and Idem.
Pop
Plugin Oriented Programming (Pop) makes it easier to make pluggable and malleable software supported by a multitude of engineers. Compartmentalizing software development allows distributed teams take advantage of smaller, more portable projects.
Tiamat
Named after a multi headed dragon, a bringer of order out of chaos, Tiamat is an open source project that brings order to the world of Python code. While Python is popular in that it’s efficient and easy to learn, it’s short-coming lies in its end-user distribution. Tiamat bridges the long-standing challenge of distributing Python binaries, instantly providing portability from source code.
Idem
Originally developed as a programming language, Idem exposes stateful programming constructs that make things like enforcing the state of an application, configuration, SaaS system or others very simple.
Moving Forward
Looking into the future and building on the foundation of Salt ingenuity in infrastructure automation, the team hopes to operationalize cloud, API and workstream flows. Open source allows us to mobilize around a lot of ideas, solving hard problems via community. VMware’s support of open source through its prolific sponsorship of new and community donated projects has already proven to be a great landing spot for SaltStack. What’s more, SaltStack now has access to corporate resources such as standardized testing, ongoing code management and a vast array of opportunities to tightly integrate SaltStack software into many of VMware’s products. Our team can now solve problems that were more difficult to solve as a small company.
Learn more
Janae Andrus is the new Salt Community Manager. She and I sat down recently with Alex Williams on the New Stack Makers Podcast. While we cover a lot of ground as we span our history together in this space. I’d like to invite you to tune in and hear why we believe SaltStack’s integration into the VMware portfolio will further invigorate the collective of open source projects in this space.
