Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

By : Joseph Hall
Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

By: Joseph Hall

Overview of this book

SaltStack is a powerful configuration management and automation suite designed to manage servers and tens of thousands of nodes. This book showcases Salt as a very powerful automation framework. We will review the fundamental concepts to get you in the right frame of mind, and then explore Salt in much greater depth. You will explore Salt SSH as a powerful tool and take Salt Cloud to the next level. Next, you’ll master using Salt services with ease in your infrastructure. You will discover methods and strategies to scale your infrastructure properly. You will also learn how to use Salt as a powerful monitoring tool. By the end of this book, you will have learned troubleshooting tips and best practices to make the entire process of using Salt pain-free and easy.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 1.  Essentials Revisited

Salt is a very powerful remote automation framework. Before we delve into the more advanced topics that this book covers, it would be wise to go back and review a few essentials. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using remote execution
  • Basic SLS file tree structure
  • Using states for configuration management
  • Basics of grains, pillars, and templates

This book assumes that you already have root access on a device with a common distribution of Linux installed. The machine used in the examples in this book is running Ubuntu 14.04, unless stated otherwise. Most examples should run on other major distributions, such as recent versions of Fedora, RHEL 5/6/7, Suse, or Arch Linux.