Thomas S Hatch writes:

Salt is a remote execution system which is similar to the Fedora func project and puppet labs' Marionette Collective, but the executions are called in parallel across multiple systems thanks to zeromq. Salt has also been written with the developer in mind, salt can be VERY easily extended with modules and can act as a standalone remote execution system or act as a simple to use message passing and managing broker with authentication and encryption built in.

Also one of the goals for salt is simplicity, I will argue that it is the easiest remote execution system out there today to manage and set up!

I just released 0.8.0 and the release announcement is here on my blog:
http://red45.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/salt-0-8-0/

Look at the earlier release notes for a more robust explanation of what salt can do:
http://red45.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/salt-0-7-0/
http://red45.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/salt-0-6-0-released/

The tarball can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/downloads/thatch45/salt/salt-0.8.0.tar.gz

and salt is hosted on github:
https://github.com/thatch45/salt

I am also working on a system called butter that runs on top of salt for more complicated and compound remote executions, but I will post about it when I have the initial release in the next few weeks!

Please check out the salt wiki and the salt code, there are howtos for setting up salt and development on the github wiki.

Thank you for zeromq, it has opened up powerful capabilities for network development and has enabled me to make salt into an amazing project!