Salt started as a tool to provide a method to execute remote commands. Nowadays, it's a complete open source solution for infrastructure management maintained by the company SaltStack. It's often referred to as SaltStack Platform.
Salt is easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds.
Salt is different from Ansible in terms of architecture. It is a client-server model; communication between the master and the slave is secured by the ZeroMQ transport method using keys for authentication. If you want to use SSH (agentless), it's possible, but the client-server model is chosen because that scales much better than working with many SSH clients at the same time. It is also different in the way you provide the configuration. You can push the configuration to...