I’m debating if I should deploy Ansible which is VERY simple and quite capable and very popular, or deploy Salt which has far more features and “power” but it’s more complex and less popular – so troubleshooting can be harder.
Any advice or opinions would be helpful and appreciated.
I wonder what makes you think that SaltStack is less popular than Ansible; as a matter of fact, SaltStack seems to have more contributions from different developers than the other solution. Also there is a large community of folks using SaltStack, so getting help or even professional advice from a consultant should be no problem.
Both solutions are good, but work differently. Ansible heavily relies on a more open network, while SaltStack uses a message bus for communication which even works in very restricted environments.
I went down the SaltStack path since it combines Parallel Mass Execution stuff (e.g. running commands on all servers simultaneously), Orchestration and Config Management.
I guess at the end it is a matter of your own preferences. Why not having a look at both solutions by e.g. solving a simple task (such as installing and configuring a simple service on a single node) and see how it works out for you.
For the most things you need in an infrastructure, both SaltStack and Ansible should be able to do the job. If you want to use something which requires no coding skills at all SaltStack might be the better solution, though.
I hope this helps.
Unfortunately I can't edit my own post, so I'll just add another comment:
My statement
> If you want to use something which requires no coding skills at all
only applies if you want to use more powerful features/abilities of Ansible. Basic config mgmt can be performed without coding skills, of course.