What is Salt?

Salt or SaltStack is an orchestration and configuration management tool, and one of the most prominent representatives of this genre (together with Puppet and Ansible).
The technology behind Salt is in between the other two tools: similar to Puppet, it allows for automated configuration management by using a “control node and managed nodes” principle. However, just like Ansible, Salt can be used via SSH without a client.

A unique selling point of Salt is the Reactor System. This triggers fully automatic actions in response to certain events, for example rebooting a system after installing updates.