To many, Salt Cloud has become a crucial part of the stack of Salt tools. Originally designed for little more than creating and Salting virtual machines across multiple cloud hosting providers, its functionalities have grown to become much more. In this chapter, we'll discuss the following topics:
The basics of configuration
Extending configuration directives
Building custom deploy scripts
Working with cloud maps
Building and using autoscale Reactors
Take note that this chapter discusses how to manage compute nodes or instances, which generally refer to virtual machines. However, since some cloud hosting companies also provide cloud resources by creating an entire physical server, or bare metal instance available to the user, we will refer to them all collectively as compute instances.