What Makes Open Source Projects Take Off? The Salt Case Study

With thousands of open source projects starting up each year, and thousands more struggling to get off the ground, it begs the question why some projects succeed while others do not. Is it about the problem that the project is solving? Is it about the approach to solving the problem? Is it about the vision from the person who started the project? Or is it about the people who make up the project team?

Last January, Salt was named an Open Source Rookie of the Year, recognizing it as one of the top new open source projects initiated in 2011.  While Salt is still a very young project, the Salt community has been growing at a massive pace, with over 90 individuals in IRC and about 190 members on the mailing list. According to Ohloh.net, the project now has over 80 contributors (from only 10 at the start of 2012!). And with 735 commits in March alone, Salt is moving at a pace that most open source projects only dream about.

And that makes me wonder: what makes open source projects successful?  And with so many new open source projects, how do projects like Salt stand out and succeed amongst the plethora of other projects?

First and foremost, Salt is solving a new set of problems that have emerged out of the cloud agenda – helping people configure and manage their cloud infrastructure – which is top-of-mind for many organizations today. From saltstack.org: “Salt is a powerful remote execution manager that can be used to administer servers in a fast and efficient way. Salt allows commands to be executed across large groups of servers. This means systems can be easily managed, but data can also be easily gathered. Quick introspection into running systems becomes a reality. Between the remote execution system and state management, Salt addresses the backbone of cloud and data center management.”

Thomas Hatch, project leader for Salt, explains that Salt operates in the same space as tools like Puppet and Chef, but is designed very differently. “Salt has an elegant design — powerful and extensible, yet simple enough that it can be molded to work in any environment.” As Hatch well understands, UI is another key to success.

Hatch said that virtualization and cloud solutions are under development and that Salt will soon be able to integrate with services like the ec2 cloud, in addition to private cloud setups. And since Salt creates generic interfaces for many backend services, a unified multi-cloud controller is also being actively developed. Hatch says, “You don’t need to be married to a single solution — the goal is to allow for a private cloud to integrate one or many virtualization (compartmentalization) technologies behind a single interface.”

This means that you will be able to deploy KVM alongside LXC or BSD Jails, which will enable companies to use the flexibility of cloud computing to put the right resources in the right places, without the same overhead of multiple management domains. And because the communication layer is generic, Salt can communicate across multiple public clouds and private clouds seamlessly – and, you guessed it, this flexibility is another important part of making open source projects “stick.”

Salt also comes with free monitoring. Data collection tools are available in the Salt module library, and while a monitoring front end hasn’t been developed for Salt yet, the existing tools can be used for very fast and efficient data gathering and discovery – another boon for project users.

Hatch tells us that Salt is gaining momentum, with “quite a few companies using us internally and a number of other large names looking at deploying us internally.” As an example of how flexible Salt can be, a startup called 30loops built Salt modules that gather specific data about their service, allowing different components to communicate with each other. So instead of just using Salt for configuration management, they have integrated it directly with the backend of their hosting service, and that’s a sure sign of project success.

When asked about the future of Salt, Hatch responded “The Salt project continues to grow, and a year from now I expect that we’ll have a significantly larger user base and have received some funding to support growth. Our initial cloud offerings will be shipping and we’ll be using our core framework to configure even more devices.”

So with a large and growing project team, a strong and enthusiastic leader, and high demand for a flexible, highly configurable solution to administer cloud infrastructure, Salt looks like it’s on track for some big success moving forward. I look forward to watching Salt continue to grow – kudos to Thomas Hatch and the entire Salt community!