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

Working with YAML


YAML is a very easy language to work with. It is very easy for humans to read, and in most cases, it is easy for computers to parse. However, there are little things inside YAML that can cause pain to even the most experienced users.

YAML basics

Before we get into troubleshooting YAML, let's go over the basic functionality that you are likely to use in Salt.

YAML is based on a key/value model that is very common in a number of programming languages. In Perl and Ruby it's called a hash, in Python it's called a dictionary (or dict, for short), and in other languages it has other names. Because Salt is written in Python, we'll henceforth refer to it as a dict.

dict

A dict is a set of keys, each of which has a value. This value may be a number of things, including a string, a number, a list (or array), another dict, and so on. The following is a very basic dict, in YAML format:

larry: cheesecake 
shemp: chocolate cake 
moe: apple pie 

The order of the items in a dict...