[duebbert]

Interesting to see that Salt seems to have a slightly higher following here compared to Ansible.

I'm managing around 10-15 servers only but after having it all set up with Salt for the last year, I am now migrating it to Ansible despite it being a big hassle. I find it much more straight forward and am happy with the documentation so far.

Salt has bitten me twice in that after (non-master) server updates commands would fail with non-descriptive error message. I reported it as bugs but got too frustrated in the end and decided that with a new server I will start a migration to Ansible.

Very happy so far even though I do see the problems of speed (haven't investigated tuning it) and that it seems to require too many shell work arounds. But conceptually it seems much cleaner to me.

[mpdehaan2]

Not sure on trends, it's hard to say.

I think this is probably accurate-ish:

http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2014/...

Definitely investigate the tuning options. ControlPersist + pipelining does awesome wonders. We have pipelining off by default for max compatibility just so nobody gets stuck on an initial install, but feel free to stop by the list if you have questions.

Using "with_items" on yum/apt transactions also saves giant loads of time keeping things in single transactions.

http://www.ansible.com/blog/ansible-performance-tuning