Introduction

The digital world as we know it is constantly changing. New technologies, both in hardware and software, are released daily. The number of connected systems to manage grows exponentially day after day. The Internet itself is larger than all of us–it’s the biggest thing mankind has ever built. If you think about the scale at which the technologies we work with are expanding it can be daunting. The unending amounts of data created, transferred, stored and analyzed is more than any one of us can keep up with. It’s all pretty amazing if you really think about it.

Imagine for a minute the vastness of it all. The entire Internet. All the systems. Servers old and new. Clouds, public and private, constantly forming, shifting and expanding. Billions of websites around the world. Overwhelming really. At that scale there’s not one of us that could manage it. Not a hundred of us or a thousand of us. The only reason it works is because of skilled admins dutifully maintaining their little sections individually. That’s really the only way it can be done.. or is it?

Every now and then something changes the game. Some brilliant visionary among us comes up with an elegant solution to a problem. Something that, for those who see it, changes everything. These solutions are sometimes software. Sometimes they are hardware. Sometimes it’s just a new way to think about a problem. I’m sure you can come up with a few examples. A piece of software you discovered that makes your life so much easier you wonder how you ever got by without it. Once something has improed your life that much, how could you ever go back? Once you’ve seen the potential it’s really hard to not be excited.

This is the way I feel about SaltStack. I see a revolutionary tool unlike any other currently available. I see the collective contributions of brilliant developers around the world creating solutions to problems nearly as fast as they arrive. I see a modular, flexible and lightweight alternative to the legacy systems and methodologies that we’ve been using for years. What I see with SaltStack is the future of computing.

History

The history of SaltStack goes back for years. It is the constantly improving culmination of many attempts at solving a common problem. The author and lead developer, Thomas S. Hatch, tried solving this problem many times for many companies. Each time improving on the last, and each time gaining valuable insight into the most efficient ways to manage systems. Let me take you back a few years to when my history with Salt began.

It was 2011 and I had just been hired by Thomas at an online music startup. He had recruited a few of us that had worked together in the past in what I thought of as a dream team. If I could work with anyone again, it would be these guys. We got along great. We worked hard. We solved complex problems that nobody had solved before. We were breaking new ground and growing fast.

Thomas started working on a tool to manage our private cloud infrastructure. The idea was, using some home-grown tools, we would be able to spin up machines on the fly, provision them and drop them into different environments. When we had updates to systems we would simply spin up a new machine with the latest code on it and transition it into place, recycling the old machine. The vision was there. It was, at the time, very exciting. The only problem was that the tools weren’t there. The vision was there, but we didn’t yet have the tools to take us from point A to point B.

Remember, we were a fledgling startup with grand ideas but not a lot of money. We had to come up with our own solutions and build our own tools. Everything from scratch, with a small team.

By the time I hired on work had begun on these tools. We had a tool called “Bacon”, another called “Butter” and a third called “Salt”. These were in-house, python-based tools for provisioning and managing our private cloud. At the time these three were very rudimentary, but for the most part they got the job done. They had little bugs here and there, but we also had a very talented development team that squashed those about as quickly as they came up.

I fondly remember times working in what couldn’t even be called a conference room, shared with five other system engineers. I’d run into an issue with one of our tools and called it out. I’d promptly hear Thomas call back “give me one minute!”, and like clockwork the bug would be fixed. Time and time again, improvements implemented at the speed only a startup can seem to manage. Day by day our tools become more mature, our infrastructure became larger, and the company seemed to be doing great.

Somewhere along the line here Thomas had the foresight to get the company to allow him to open source these tools. He had developed most of it on his own time at home in his basement (yes, the old cliche), and primarily fixed bugs with our feedback while at the office. He placed the code on github and work continued.. but not for long.

Before we knew it months had passed and it was the Holidays. Like any startup we had minimal time off during the season. There were constantly things to fix and systems to build. We were preparing for a big deal with a mobile telecom company and hoping to expand. All of our hard work was finally paying off! We were all very excited. We were supposed to be getting a dedicated NOC team, new hires, data center expansion–all the things we needed to support this upcoming deal. Unfortunately I don’t think any of us really saw what was really coming.

I remember it clearly to this day. One of the perks of working at this startup was flexible working and office hours. We spent most of our time working from home and only met as a team in the office once or twice a week. This was a Wednesday, the week between Christmas and New Years, and I was working from home in an old beatup chair in my living room. Our lead network engineer and my roommate at the time was upstairs with the flu, taking the day off.

Then an email arrived. “Staff meeting conference call @5:00pm”. I didn’t think much of it, and dialed in at the suggested time. This, depending on how you look at it, is either where it all ended or where it all began.

Layoffs. Everyone. The investors had pulled out. There would be no severance. There would be no more work. Report to the office tomorrow to turn in any equipment you have and good luck to you. I was floored! I remember being so shocked and sitting up so abruptly in surprise that my laptop tumbled to the floor. My company laptop that I was expected to return in the morning. What had just happened? Was he for real? I–we–were all shocked. What were we going to do? I’d never been laid off before. The rest of that afternoon is a bit of a blur, but I’ll always remember that moment as a crossroads for a lot of us.

As the days and the weeks went on some of us found jobs right away. Others took a bit longer. For some people it was a great move. They landed even better jobs with better companies. Some people found temporary consulting work. If you’ve ever been part of a massive layoff you know how it goes. It’s difficult, but people usually make it. During this time we all kept in touch pretty well. We’d share job leads and keep tabs on who was ending up where, and did that company need anyone else. During all of this there was one person that didn’t seem worried, and didn’t seem to be as concerned about finding a new job. Thomas.

Thomas had a plan. Something bigger than where we came from or where a lot of us ended up. He was going to strike out on his own with a new tool that had been slowly picking up popularity in the open source community. He had decided he was going to form SaltStack, the company behind the Salt tool we had begun with at the startup.

If you’re reading this I think you have some idea how that turned out. SaltStack is now a growing, successful company filled with talented people. Some of the people from our original dream team now work for Thomas again, this time at a much more successful company.

To give you an idea of the usefulness of the Salt tool, every one of the systems engineers from that original startup have deployed Salt for our new employers. I’m currently architecting a Salt based solution across multiple products and nearly fourty-thousand servers. Salt is a game changer and I hope to be able to work with it long into the future.