SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale. This, along with the fact that SaltStack is a event engine, allows teams to be able to to creatively attack problems and view problems within our infrastructure.

The SecOps product allows us to see where there may be issues, what a current patch level may be at, and what the recommended patch is.

As far as compliance, SecOps is able to reduce the time it takes us to verify our systems are compliant with policy.

Preparation of Hybris Commerce HY300 training laboratory environments and Hybris Expert Services demo infrastructure went from days of effort down to hours. Reliability and consistency is no longer a concern.

We have been able to integrate with AWS to deploy continuous delivery services with an extremely quick turnaround time. Salt lets us manage those instances, and control the deployment seamlessly.

We can do the following from the same tool:

• Deploy code
• Redeploy code and platform
• Maintain system compliance

We are moving from managing a handful of individual servers to being able to manage large scale collections. If we need to fit a particular use case, SaltStack makes it very easy to provision a new cloud instance quickly and almost effortlessly.

We can now deploy a new (Linux-based) ERP server in 15 minutes; automated, all using the same template and standard. Before this, would take us two hours following a documented procedure.

SaltStack provides the capability necessary to truly streamline our SDLC and environment management. From a high level, it allows coders to code, testers to test (automated testing too), and admins to admin in the most inter-connected and effective way possible.

They put in a few patches for Windows machine orchestration, but the experience was still painful.

Some of what we do, we could not do without SaltStack.

Currently, most of our configuration is in SaltStack, so scaling up when necessary with or without Salt Cloud would be real easy.

Traditionally, the team here expects the use of Golden AMIs for scaling up the infra, which, though useful, has its limitations:

• Security updates to the OS are the biggest concern.
• Non-standard configuration on one server would also cause some serious issues if its AMI is used by mistake in scaling up.

If, instead, we push configuration to new servers during scaling up, then we fix those issues.

And, I was also considering the fact SaltStack gives near flat-line performance (for both remote execution and pushing changes through states), whether the infra size is 10 servers or if it has grown beyond a few hundred. So, that is at least one area that we need not be worried about.

The configuration management is at least one aspect that would take care of itself (not considering redundancies, reporting, etc. required for SaltStack here at the moment).

We have scaled from two servers to about 140 servers in a very short period of time. This would have been a nightmare had it not been for the SaltStack configurations.

We have developed a complete, multi-tiered, stable build system for our Internet servers with SaltStackas the base of the build system. It is stable and easy to modify as we grow and change our needs.

We are able to control updates on servers to streamline the process

SaltStack allows me to answer user requests in a very efficient manner.

This product has saved us time in standing up new servers, as well as allowed us to automate the deployment of these servers and the applications that run on them.

SaltStack gave us very useful automation tools that allowed us to standardize our environment, move at a much faster pace through repeatable deployments, and self-documentation of our infrastructure.

It allows us to describe the desired state of our entire fleet of servers through simple to understand syntax and templates all available at a single place.

This is great for things like documenting what a single machine or a group of machine does and how they are configured. It is also good in the event that one of them is lost and a new one needs to be provisioned quickly.

Instead of setting it up by hand, we end up telling it "you are this type of machine" and SaltStack will take care of ensuring that the machine becomes what is expected.

It also means that any machine of "this type" will be setup in a consistent manner thus avoiding unexpected surprises that could potentially become the cause of outages.

Centralized administration and orchestration of severs and services.

Developers and systems engineers could work together more closely.

As it provides maximum functionality, it keeps automation short and sweet. This helps writing automation in a modular format. SaltStack helped us in optimizing infrastructure related tasks, such as operations.

We spent far less time to upgrade and configure all of our hosts. A lot of time was saved.

We use it to automatically install software on servers with the minion installed – based on the server name. So we can bring any machine up to spec by simply changing the host name. We have plans to automate it even further; it is just a matter of time.

For example, with automation, before SaltStack, user management to access servers by SSH was done "by hand". The risk was leaving life-long access for some users, who were no longer with the company.

Salt lets you run commands on hundreds of servers at once; and sync up software, tools, and scripts across your infrastructure.

I am now able to rollout critical updates within seconds on all affected servers, and it doesn't matter if there are five or 500 of them.

We created pipelines for all our products.

• We decreased deployment CD times from hours to minutes across different cloud providers on several hundred systems.
• We used a SaltStack agent as a “Convergence” agent which provided us with management, monitoring, and backup capabilities.

It’s a configuration management tool. We are using it for system deployment with AWS, patching of OS and applications. Deploying a patch on 200 systems is now just a click.