Azure Automation vs Salt

Azure Automation is a cloud service for process automation, configuration management, patch management, and remediation automation on Windows and Linux. Process automation is divided into job run time and watchers: the job run time plan includes 500 minutes per month, while the watchers plan is listed at free with 744 hours included monthly. Configuration management has separate Azure-node and non-Azure-node plans. The Azure-node option includes a configuration pull service and change tracking; the non-Azure-node option includes five nodes per month. An Update management plan lists update visibility and update deployment. These options cover automating processes, managing configuration, and handling updates across both supported operating systems. Azure Automation uses a cloud deployment model. The pricing model is listed as freemium, although the facts also state there is no free plan.

Salt is a free, open-source framework for remote execution, configuration management, provisioning and infrastructure orchestration. A single execution can run commands across thousands of systems in seconds. A typical setup has a master managing minions, but Salt also supports agentless operation through salt-ssh or salt-proxy and stand-alone use. Salt states define configurations that can be extended and layered, while orchestration can order work by dependency, such as preparing a load balancer before a web-server cluster. Salt Cloud provisions systems on cloud hosts and hypervisors and can connect new virtual machines to a master. Its documented providers include Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Azure, OpenStack, DigitalOcean, Linode, VMware and Proxmox. SaltStack Config adds a web interface, role-based access control, multi-master support, reporting and an enterprise API, along with LDAP, SAML, OIDC and Active Directory integrations. Salt uses RSA key authentication and encrypted master-minion communication. It is self-hosted and licensed under Apache 2.0.