SaltStack fundamentally helps to improve the way enterprise IT organizations and DevOps teams configure and manage all aspects of a modern data center infrastructure. SaltStack is built for the speed and scale of the cloud and web scale applications. The largest enterprise IT and DevOps organizations in the world use SaltStack to orchestrate and control any cloud while providing automation for the DevOps toolchain. SaltStack is built on an extremely fast, scalable and powerful remote execution platform for efficient control and automation of distributed system infrastructure and the applications, code and data that run on it.
Data centers are the modern-day factories and there is a new industrial revolution underway. Unfortunately, legacy systems and configuration management tools that were supposed to help, typically make the problem worse.
SaltStack exists to make the cloud assembly line fast and effective through the deployment of legions of software-based minions to automate all the internet factory jobs that nobody wants to do by hand.
Tom Hatch, SaltStack CTO and co-founder, was an assembly-line worker, building the internet one cloud at a time. He was fed up with legacy management tools that were too slow, too hard to use, and not built to automate web scale. So Tom wrote Salt in his basement in February 2011. He wrote it in Python to be an extremely fast and flexible remote execution engine. In two short years Salt has exploded in popularity.
Tom created Salt to manage deployment and configuration of both the application layer and the infrastructure the code runs on. It was built from the beginning to manage the complexity of physical or virtual server environments, and the scale of public or private clouds like AWS, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine.
According to the 2012 GitHub Octoverse list, Salt is one of the top 10 open source projects attracting the highest number of contributors.
Tom is the creator and principal architect of SaltStack. His years of experience as principle cloud architect for Beyond Oblivion, software engineer for Applied Signal Technology, and systems admin for Backcountry.com provided real-world insight into requirements of the modern data center not met by existing tools. Toms knowledge and hands-on experience with dozens of new and old infrastructure management technologies helped to established the vision for Salt. Today, Tom is one of the most active contributors in the open-source community. For his work on Salt, in 2012 Tom received the Black Duck Rookie of the Year award and was named to the GitHub Octoverse Top 10 list for the project with the highest number of unique contributors, rubbing shoulders with projects like Ruby on Rails and OpenStack.
Rhett has been marketing enterprise IT software for thirteen years, helping to take both Altiris and ServiceNow from early stage startups, through IPOs to multi-billion dollar valuations. He spent the last five years running marketing and communications programs for ServiceNow, the leading enterprise IT cloud company and standout 2012 IPO success. With a knack for discovering disruptive technology, Rhett specializes in challenging the legacy status quo while helping tech pros, and the innovative technologies they use, speak for themselves.
Rhett does enterprise software marketing with a focus on corporate awareness, lead gen, marketing communications, influencer, analyst and media relations, customer marketing, community building and evangelism, with writing, editing, content creation, and social marketing appropriately mixed in.
CEO and Co-Founder at SaltStack