Salt To Ansible Migration Guide

I'm writing this in the second half of 2025 soon after retiring with 35 years in software development. I used Salt extensively for the last 7 years, and before that I had been using Puppet for 7 years. I was often involved in tasks that eventually became known as DevOps, mostly focusing on configuration management at smaller companies.

I became disillusioned with Salt after the company was sold to VMware which itself was later acquired by Broadcom. Now in late 2025, Salt isn't getting much attention or support from its current owner. Many of the core Salt developers have left the company, and the cadence of bug fixes and releases seem to be slowing down Also before retiring, I looked at the job market and found almost nobody is looking for people with Salt experience while at least some people were still looking for Ansible experience

With that in mind, I decided to learn Ansible by porting the Salt states for my home lab over to Ansible. I kept notes along the way, and thought other developers might benefit if I published what I learned.