Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

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 (20 chapters)
Mastering SaltStack Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

All about syndication


In order to understand what syndication is all about in Salt, let's step back a few years to when an infrastructure's size did not often go beyond a few dozen nodes. Server management software didn't really need to handle a lot of connections, and often didn't.

Different folks, different strokes

Puppet was one of the earlier configuration-management platforms that really started addressing scale. Since Puppet uses an HTTP-based methodology, early documentation discussed the pros and cons and the various configurations of different web servers.

As we discussed in the previous chapter, Salt doesn't use HTTP and so needs to employ different strategies to address scale. On its own, some users report using Salt to manage over 10,000 machines. However, not everybody has the kind of beefy hardware that those users have available for their masters.

The syndic system was designed for infrastructures where the master was not expected to be powerful enough to handle the load from...