Salt is a great choice for a configuration management system. I have found that it scales well, both in terms of number of nodes, and complexity of configurations. However, I have found one aspect of Salt that remains under-developed: Salt doesn’t have great support for custom groupings of minions. Minion groups (which could also be called node groups, host groups, instance groups, etc.) allow you to target a predefined group of minions.

I love using Salt to configure and manage servers at scale. Typically, a Salt master server manages an army of servers which are on the same private network. A salt-minion daemon runs on each client server and communicates with the master. Sometimes you need to manage a server which is outside of your internal network, such as a marketing web server running on a service like AWS LightSail, Linode, or Digital Ocean. That’s when salt-ssh comes in handy.