Grappling with SSH

SSH is in fact based on concepts very different from the primary architecture of Salt. Salt was designed to communicate with large numbers of remote machines at once; SSH was designed to interact with only one at a time. Let's take a few minutes to examine some of the differences between Salt and SSH.

Remote shells

Let's take a step back in time to when the Internet wasn't around yet and the ARPANET was brand new. To accompany this new concept to nationally and globally interconnected networks, a series of new protocols was introduced. Telnet, a communication mechanism to take advantage of them, was also introduced. Internet protocols were based on telnet, including a remote shell.

As security needs grew, so did the need to secure telnet. SSH was born; eventually, the OpenSSH project was broadly shipped and supported by a number of Unix-based platforms. While SSH means Secure Shell, it was in fact designed to securely tunnel applications that had traditionally communicated...