[carlivar]

I feel like every discussion of configuration management should start with what scale you are talking about. Managing 100 servers is quite a bit different than our environment which is about 7500 logical hosts on 5000+ physical servers across 5 datacenters (real datacenters, not cloud).

We looked at Salt versus Ansible and chose Salt mainly due to scaling concerns with Ansible. I believe Ansible has been addressing this, but at the time we did our evals last year it was a concern. We skipped Puppet due to DSL and Chef because we didn't want to delve into Ruby (I love Ruby, but it's not a tier-1 language for us like Python).

So far in our largest datacenter, which has 2700+ hosts, we are able to manage it with a single Salt master. That took some tuning, but it works. We have tested bringing it offline to make sure the "thundering herd" problem is mitigated.