In the world of infrastructure management, we are often forced to choose between the legacy reliability of the past and the high-speed automation of the future.
For years, HCL BigFix (formerly IBM BigFix) has been the “Heavyweight Champion”—a massive, unmovable force in endpoint management. But a challenger has matured into a dominant player: Salt (SaltStack).
If you are building a modern, self-healing infrastructure, the conversation shouldn’t just be about “patching.” It should be about reaction time, extensibility, and developer experience.
Here is why Salt doesn’t just compete with BigFix—it changes the game entirely.
The Old Guard: Where BigFix Fits
Let’s be fair: BigFix is a tank. It is legendary for its ability to manage hundreds of thousands of endpoints, even over slow satellite links. Its “Relevance Language” is incredibly efficient at querying endpoint status without draining CPU.
But BigFix shows its age in the modern DevOps world:
- The Learning Curve: “Relevance Language” is proprietary and complex. It is a skill you learn only for BigFix.
- The Paradigm: BigFix is primarily a polling-based system. It asks, “Are you compliant?” and waits for an answer.
- The Closed Box: It is a commercial product with a “black box” feel compared to open-source ecosystems.
Why Salt Stands Out: The “React vs. Poll” Revolution
Salt was built differently. It wasn’t designed just to manage servers; it was designed to control them at the speed of thought.
1. The Event Bus (The Killer Feature)
This is where Salt leaves BigFix in the dust. BigFix relies on agents checking in. Salt relies on a bi-directional Event Bus.
- BigFix says: “I will check this server every few minutes to see if the service is down.”
- Salt says: “The service just died. The minion fired an event to the master. The master triggered a Reactor state. The service is already restarting.”
This allows for Event-Driven Automation. You aren’t just patching; you are building a self-healing infrastructure that reacts to security threats, file changes, or load spikes in milliseconds.
2. Speed (ZeroMQ)
Salt is built on ZeroMQ, a high-performance asynchronous messaging library. It is capable of parallel execution across thousands of nodes nearly instantly.
- Remote Execution: Want to check disk usage on 10,000 servers? With Salt, you get the results back in seconds, not minutes.
- The “Feel”: Using the Salt CLI feels like you are typing on the local machine, even when you are controlling a fleet of thousands.
3. Python vs. Relevance
BigFix requires you to learn Relevance Language (which looks like Q: name of operating system).
Salt is built on Python.
- Extensibility: If Salt can’t do something out of the box, you can write a standard Python module to do it.
- Hiring: It is infinitely easier to find an engineer who knows Python than one who is a certified BigFix Relevance expert.
The Code Face-Off: Auto-Healing a Service
Let’s look at a real-world scenario: Nginx crashes on a server. How do these two tools handle it?
The BigFix Method: “The Loop”
BigFix relies on a Fixlet that contains Relevance (the condition) and Action Script (the fix). The client evaluates this loop periodically.
Relevance (Condition):
Bash
exists service "nginx" whose (state of it = "Stopped")
Action Script (The Fix):
Bash
waithidden /usr/sbin/service nginx start
- The Pro: It works reliably even if the network is flaky.
- The Con: Latency. You are at the mercy of the client’s polling interval. If your loop is set to 15 minutes, your web server is down for 15 minutes.
The Salt Method: “The Reactor”
Salt pushes intelligence to the edge. The Minion monitors the service and fires an event the moment it dies. The Master catches that event and fires a reaction immediately.
1. The Beacon (On the Minion):
Configured to watch the service and fire an event only when it changes.
YAML
beacons:
service:
- services:
nginx:
onchangeonly: True
2. The Reactor (On the Master):
Listens for the event and triggers the fix instantly.
YAML
restart_nginx:
local.service.start:
- tgt: {{ data['id'] }}
- arg:
- nginx
- The Result: The moment Nginx crashes, Salt restarts it. The downtime is measured in milliseconds, not minutes.
The Head-to-Head
| Feature | BigFix | Salt (SaltStack) |
| Primary Architecture | Relay-based (Polling/UDP) | Master/Minion (ZeroMQ Event Bus) |
| Language | Relevance & Action Script (Proprietary) | Python & YAML (Universal) |
| Reaction Time | Minutes (Polling Interval) | Milliseconds (Event-Driven) |
| Automation Style | Compliance Enforcement | Reactive & Orchestrated |
| Community | Vendor-locked | Open Source (Vibrant ecosystem) |
The Verdict:
BigFix is an excellent tool for “Endpoint Management”—keeping a laptop fleet patched and compliant.
But if you are running servers, cloud infrastructure, or applications, you need more than management. You need Orchestration.
Salt stands out because it bridges the gap between configuration management (like Ansible) and remote execution. It allows you to:
- Define your infrastructure as code (State files).
- React to problems instantly (Beacons/Reactors).
- Scale without losing speed (ZeroMQ).
For the modern engineer, the choice is clear. Stop polling your infrastructure and asking it how it’s doing. Start listening to it with Salt.
