I would advise those considering this solution to ensure they have the necessary in-house talent or access to an external vendor who knows this solution well. It is not a widely used technology so it is important to ensure you can support it. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. It is a strong and flexible solution. 

The product works great for changing configurations. I recommend it for the DevSecOps environment. I rate it a seven out of ten as it is not user-friendly.

SaltStack, when viewed in the light that it is an event engine, is a very powerful tool.

I rate the solution as an eight out of ten.

Make sure you have cross-functional collaboration between your development teams and operations teams.

Develop configuration as code in parallel with code development.

Use SaltStack to deploy and control both development sandbox environments and also full scale test and production environments.

Don’t rely on the SaltStack documentation alone; use Google and other resources to find help, if you are not going for paid support. Windows support is lacking but you can overcome the issues with a bit of ingenuity.

Adopt it in full, including the API.

If you are planning to use the open source version, plan to allocate more project time than you think you need. However, once it's in place it will save you a great deal of effort.

Try it out; it won't cost you anything but some time.

Do it and take full advantage of its capability. Be creative and automate everything you can with it.

Stay away from Windows orchestration. Have an alternative for orchestrating Windows machines. Think about how to prepare test cases when things change. The breaks spread like wildfire.

Thoroughly research how SaltStack works; that knowledge has helped me a lot.
SaltStack is a one-stop-shop for your datacenter's management, monitoring and state control needs. Using it that way allows you to get the most out of the tool. It is configuration management, but also orchestration, monitoring, and has reactive capabilities.

Create valid states for all environments and keep the difference between these environments minimal. Use test cases as much as possible.

Ansible and SaltStack are very good solutions. I prefer SaltStack as its been developed from the ground up and is a lot better than Puppet and Chef.

I spent my time learning Saltstack through trial and error, researching the online document system as needed. If you decide to use SaltStack, buy the O'Reilly book called Salt Essentials first. It is not very big, but it explains the concepts required to get a working system very well. I think if I had gotten the book first, I would have cut my initial time spent learning in half.

Read the documentation to learn as much as you can.

Just install it and use it for remote execution at first. You'll see how powerful it is.

Define the scope of what you need a configuration management tool to use and then look at all available options and the potential drawbacks of those options. Nothing can beat hiring a sys admin with experience in different technologies.

I recommend SaltStack because, for SysOps or DevOps users, automation is a key part of getting your product out and allows for faster time to market.

Take some time to learn the types of problems it can solve and you will easily see the benefits that it can bring.

Be patient and you'll get a great solution.

This product is in good shape now and the community support is vibrant. I learned a lot from them while implementing it.

Look at Digital Ocean's guide for initially setting up the Salt server (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/saltstack-infrastructure-installing-the-salt-master). Group your configurations by logical components, serve any environment/deployment-specific variables from pillar files, and keep templates as simple as possible (put logic for assigning variables in the *.sls files where there's likely to be other logic).

As a DevOps engineer, this CM tool is truly made for system administrator usability rather than for the developer.

Read the documentation. There is nothing fancy or special to know before using it.

Absolutely, positively, go to YouTube first before looking at the documentation. Documentation gives you a great start of what you need, then you look at the code to see the configurable options.

Have a good plan about how you are going to target your infrastructure; a solid naming convention helps a lot.

Read the docs.

I have no advice; it depends on infrastructure & application.