Salt (sometimes referred to as SaltStack) is a Python-based, open-source software for event-driven IT automation, remote task execution, and configuration management.

Supporting the "infrastructure as code" approach to data center system and network deployment and management, configuration automation, SecOps orchestration, vulnerability remediation, and hybrid cloud control.

The author of Salt, Thomas S. Hatch, had previously created several utilities for IT teams to solve the problem of systems management at scale, but found these and other open source solutions to be lacking.

In late May 2011 initial progress was made toward the delivery of configuration management built on the Salt remote execution engine.

[5][6] Salt was designed to be highly modular and easily extensible, to make it easy to mold to diverse enterprise IT use cases.