saltstack/salt

Salt (also called SaltStack) is an open-source tool for automating the configuration and management of IT infrastructure at scale. In plain terms, it lets you control many servers, virtual machines, containers, network devices, and applications from a central point, ensuring they are all consistently set up the way you want and responding to events automatically. Salt is built on Python and uses an event-driven model, meaning it can react to things happening in your infrastructure rather than just running scheduled tasks. Common uses include managing the installation and configuration of software across many machines, ensuring servers don't drift from their desired state (a problem called "configuration drift"), orchestrating multi-step deployment processes, and building self-healing systems that automatically respond to outages or problems. It supports a wide range of operating systems including CentOS, Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows, and can also manage network devices from various vendors. The original company SaltStack was acquired by VMware in 2020, and VMware was subsequently acquired by Broadcom in 2023. The Salt Project remains open source under an Apache 2.0 license, with Broadcom acting as its current sponsor and many core contributors being Broadcom employees. Commercial products built on top of Salt include VMware by Broadcom's Tanzu Salt, and Salt also powers products from Juniper, Cisco, Cloudflare, and others.