The difference is basically apples and oranges. RHEL is a Linux distribution – an operating system consisting significantly of open-source components – while Windows is a wholly proprietary operating system. Asking "Which is best" is kind of a meaningless question. Absent…

"Benchmarks" is an ambiguous term. Are you referring to security benchmarks or performance benchmarks? In either case, which specify type of benchmark are you looking for?

I have a number of customers that use it for provisioning-time system-hardening. These customers have compliance-requirements they have to meet – even with "cattle" type of deployments – but still prefer to use generic VM templates (e.g. such as those found on the AWS…

Saltstack is pretty flexible. And, especially if you're looking to do multi-platform either provisioning-time or lifecycle configuration-managment, it's one of the easier frameworks to learn Most of my customers, however (since they're trying to do "cattle" and not "pets"),…