Ansible or Salt?

[Fff Fff]

I am leaning Ansible but it's close.  

Looking for peoples opinions.

So far I prefer Ansible's serverless design doing everything over ssh with keys.  I tries salt-ssh but it's quite rudimentary in comparison.  If salt-ssh let me use pillars data instead of a roster file  to access servers it would be a lot more useful.  Having to create a separate roster file which is no where near as full featured as Ansibles inventory file makes salt-ssh a non-starter.

Ansible is slower than using a salt minion agent but I don't think that will be an issue for me.

I have a problem with Ansibles messy directory/file structure though.  Stuff is kind of all over the place.  Seems like a lot of things have been bolted on and it shows.  Salt seems more streamlined in that respect.  Also appears that Salt has a more logical and consistent syntax for sls files.  I think it is more powerful how it uses Jinja and the ability to write more programming oriented scripts although not sure if I will every need that. 

[Hugh Ma]

I actually just transitioned from saltstack to ansible a few weeks ago. 

For me ansible's playbook structure is much easier to grasp than salt. Everything is clearly defined, you know exactly what hosts, perform what roles, and which variables are associated. 

Speed wise, ansible's transportation method of ssh is very efficient and scalable. 

I haven't used Jinja too much yet in ansible, so I don't have a direct comparison, although I do know what you mean, being able to write full blown jinja-based sls files is very nice.

But I've yet to need it yet, since converting all my SLS files to Ansible, so that may speak to the wide array of modules available to you in ansible that was missing in salt.  

[Fff Fff]

The fact this got a fair number of views but almost no response says a lot.  

It appears there are a lot of people who go from Ansible to Salt but not the other direction.  So asking these questions on Salt forums gets a lot of passionate responses but not so much on Ansible forums. 

Neither here nor there.  Just an observation.  We are probably going with Ansible because we don't want to have to be come configuration management experts so the simplicity of Ansible is a big plus for us.