Book Image

Learning SaltStack - Second Edition

By : Myers
Book Image

Learning SaltStack - Second Edition

By: Myers

Overview of this book

SaltStack is one of the best infrastructure management platforms available. It provides powerful tools for defining and enforcing the state of your infrastructure in a clear, concise way. With this book learn how to use these tools for your own infrastructure by understanding the core pieces of Salt. In this book we will take you from the initial installation of Salt, through running their first commands, and then talk about extending Salt for individual use cases. From there you will explore the state system inside of Salt, learning to define the desired state of our infrastructure in such a way that Salt can enforce that state with a single command. Finally, you will learn about some of the additional tools that salt provides, including salt-cloud, the reactor, and the event system. We?ll finish by exploring how to get involved with salt and what'?s new in the salt community. Finally, by the end of the book, you'll be able to build a reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure and fully utilize the power of cloud computing.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Setting up Salt Cloud


Salt Cloud is a project that was started to work closely with Salt to manage cloud virtual machines. As infrastructures move more and more to the cloud, it's useful to have an easy-to-use, powerful abstraction around cloud provider APIs that allows us to manage them with Salt.

Starting with the 2014.1.0 release of Salt, Salt Cloud is built into Salt, rather than being kept as a separate project. However, on certain distributions, you still might have to install the salt-cloud package in order to get all of the relevant files.

However, on our Ubuntu system, this is not the case—Salt Cloud was installed when we installed the Salt master. Having said this, depending on which cloud provider you'll be using, you might have to install libcloud using the following command:

# sudo apt-get install python-libcloud

Before we configure Salt Cloud, however, we need to decide which cloud provider we are going to use, set up an account, and get some information from that cloud provider...