Preface

SaltStack (or Salt, for short) is an open source project that was started by Thomas Hatch in 2011. It was originally intended to be a lightning-fast remote execution system. Later, the various pieces that make up the Salt that we know today were added on top of this flexible layer. Salt is now one of the most popular open source projects in the world and one of the most popular infrastructure management platforms.

The project is managed by SaltStack, Inc., a company dedicated to preserving the open source nature of the software. SaltStack, Inc. provides service, long-term support, and custom code in their enterprise product, and supports the open source Salt project with a team of dedicated engineers.

Why do you care? What can Salt do for you?

Salt is the easiest, most powerful way to manage your servers. Whether you have a few, hundreds, or even tens of thousands of servers, you can use Salt to manage them from a single central point. You can use it to flexibly target any subset of your servers to run commands or accomplish tasks. You can use the state system to define the state of your infrastructure in a data-driven way and then enforce that state in seconds, with a single command. You can even create a reactive, self-healing infrastructure using the event system. Salt is written in Python and designed to be easy to extend for your own specific use-cases or purposes.

We're going to learn how to do all this and more in these pages. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge you need to begin making the management of your infrastructure easier with Salt.

Let's get to it!