@dgingerich@scottalanmiller sorry for the delay in a response from me. Working on a sev-1 at work at the moment so I'm only sporadically available. I'll be sure to take a look at this later when either the sev-1 clears up or my day is over.
I'll add a note for clarity given the title... SaltStack does not do authentication like AD does. AD does not do patching of any sort like Salt does. Salt is an alternative to common myths about AD functionality, but not to actual AD functionality. But you can use Salt to do distributed local authentication management, which does replace the need for AD, but is very different than what is being discussed here. In this case Salt is replacing GPO, not AD.
This way you can share the config(s) under conf.d between multiple machines using the same roles (or whatever Salt calls them) and have different main NGINX server settings.
If you are using Vultr as your VPS or Cloud Computing IaaS platform, then you have some simple tools to make automating a Salt Minion installation even easier. Vultr allows for "boot scripts" which run upon initial VM creation, along with their automatically installed system keys. Adding a tiny script can make all of the difference between needing to set up a new VM and having the entire process be totally automated.
Here is an example script that you can use. Notice that this is for Fedora and uses DNF. You will need a similar script for APT, YUM or other package management systems.
@scottalanmiller why install a proxy when Apaches here and working what is the benefit to having a proxy on the same server. Letβs Encrypt perfectly with Apache
Security and flexibility typically. Here is the admitted marketing material from Nginx on security: "Security and anonymity β By intercepting requests headed for your backend servers, a reverse proxy server protects their identities and acts as an additional defense against security attacks. It also ensures that multiple servers can be accessed from a single record locator or URL regardless of the structure of your local area network."