Red Hat Openshift vs Salt (for cloud and Docker)

[Markus Kramer]

I just heard that my company tries to use Red Hat Openshift to administer a cloud and Docker containers because "we have a contract with Red Hat and DevOps is cool".
There was no prior market analysis.
I assume that salt-cloud can do both but I personally only have experience with bare metal Windows hosts.


Can some one comment?
I promised a comparison.

Best regards,
Markus

[Ben Hosmer]

They _could_ both do the same thing, but SALT excels at certain things, while Openshift excels at others.

Openshift is really a platform as a service that uses docker and kubernetes. 

I happen to really like SALT and Openshift! 

SALT can be used to manage docker as well: https://blog.docker.com/2016/04/usda-docker/

[Ben Hosmer]

Looking back, I realized I probably didn't give the detail you were looking for.

Openshift can really be viewed as a dashboard around kubernetes and docker, with a private registry.

SALT is a remote execution, configuration management, and orchestration tool.

You _could_ use SALT to build your own Openshift like tool, since it's all open source. Install and configure kubernetes, etcd, docker etc. But why? It's already done for you.

You could also use SALT _with_ openshift to build and deploy your containers, manage your openshift slaves and masters, and deploy openshift in the first place.

I really see them as two different tools that might have some overlap, but they do very different things.

[Markus Kramer]

Thank you, Ben!
I now have a better understanding.