What is the difference between Terraform and Salt?

Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool focused on managing and provisioning infrastructure resources. It allows describing the desired state of infrastructure using declarative configuration files and automatically creates, modifies, and destroys resources across various clouds and services (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.).

Salt (SaltStack) is a configuration management and automation platform designed to manage the state of operating systems and applications on existing servers. SaltStack uses a "master/minion" model and enables executing commands on multiple nodes simultaneously, managing software installation, file configurations, and services.

Key differences:

Criterion	Terraform	Salt (SaltStack)
Main goal	Infrastructure management (provisioning)	Configuration management and automation
Approach	Declarative	Declarative and Imperative
Management objects	Infrastructure resources	OS state, applications, files
Operating model	Client-only (for clouds/services)	Master/Minion (for servers)
Focus	Infrastructure lifecycle	State and command execution on nodes
Typical tasks	Creating VMs, networks, load balancers	Software installation, SSH configuration, service management

Terraform creates and manages infrastructure components, while SaltStack manages the configuration of already created nodes. They are often used together: Terraform for creating servers and SaltStack for their configuration.