What does SALTSTACK stand for? 

SaltStack

SaltStack fundamentally helps to improve the way enterprise IT organizations and DevOps teams configure and manage all aspects of a modern data center infrastructure. SaltStack is built for the speed and scale of the cloud and web scale applications. The largest enterprise IT and DevOps organizations in the world use SaltStack to orchestrate and control any cloud while providing automation for the DevOps toolchain. SaltStack is built on an extremely fast, scalable and powerful remote execution platform for efficient control and automation of distributed system infrastructure and the applications, code and data that run on it.Data centers are the modern-day factories and there is a new industrial revolution underway. Unfortunately, legacy systems and configuration management tools that were supposed to help, typically make the problem worse.SaltStack exists to make the cloud assembly line fast and effective through the deployment of legions of software-based minions to automate all the internet factory jobs that nobody wants to do by hand.Tom Hatch, SaltStack CTO and co-founder, was an assembly-line worker, building the internet one cloud at a time. He was fed up with legacy management tools that were too slow, too hard to use, and not built to automate web scale. So Tom wrote Salt in his basement in February 2011. He wrote it in Python to be an extremely fast and flexible remote execution engine. In two short years Salt has exploded in popularity.Tom created Salt to manage deployment and configuration of both the application layer and the infrastructure the code runs on. It was built from the beginning to manage the complexity of physical or virtual server environments, and the scale of public or private clouds like AWS, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine.According to the 2012 GitHub Octoverse list, Salt is one of the top 10 open source projects attracting the highest number of contributors. Coincidentally, Salt is right next to OpenStack on the list.Today, SaltStack is being used by massive application development organizations and thousands of DevOps pros from around the world to essentially build and maintain a better internet. Early adopters include companies like Linkedin, HP Cloud Services and Hulu among hundreds of other first movers. As of June 2013, SaltStack, an open source software company with private funding and 15 employees, continues to build on the well-established Salt community and code base. A couple of SaltStack differentiators include:

1. Salt code is 100 percent open. By design, Salt is not "open core." That model alienates developer communities and impedes innovation at several of our contemporaries.
2. SaltStack is entirely platform agnostic. Any cloud, any infrastructure running any OS or hypervisor. SaltStack supports real-world data centers and its development is not restricted by financial arrangements or platform wars.

SaltStack Enterprise is sold commercially through a per node subscription license.

see more »