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Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

By : Joseph Hall

4.6 (5)

Mastering SaltStack

4.6 (5)

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.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Essentials Revisited

1. Essentials Revisited

Executing commands remotely

SLS file trees

Using states for configuration management

The basics of grains, pillars, and templates

Summary

2. Diving into Salt Internals

2. Diving into Salt Internals

Understanding the Salt configuration

The renderer

Understanding the loader

Plunging into the state compiler

Summary

3. Managing States

3. Managing States

Handling multiple states

Spanning multiple environments

Understanding master_tops

Using Salt Stack Formulas on GitHub

Using the Salt Package Manager

Summary

4. Exploring Salt SSH

4. Exploring Salt SSH

Grappling with SSH

Using rosters

Understanding the salt-thin agent

Using the raw SSH mode

Summary

5. Managing Tasks Asynchronously

5. Managing Tasks Asynchronously

Looking at the event system

Building reactors

Using Thorium

Using the queue system

Summary

6. Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems

6. Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems

Understanding pillar_roots

Using Salt's external pillars

Understanding SDB

Comparing pillars and SDB

Summary

7. Taking Salt Cloud to the Next Level

7. Taking Salt Cloud to the Next Level

Examining the Salt Cloud configuration

Using SDB with Salt Cloud

Building custom deploy scripts

Taking a look at cloud maps

Using reactors with Salt Cloud

Working with autoscale reactors

Summary

8. Using Salt with REST

8. Using Salt with REST

Looking at Salt's HTTP library

Understanding the Salt API

Working with webhooks

Summary

9. Understanding the RAET and TCP Transports

9. Understanding the RAET and TCP Transports

Comparing RAET and ZeroMQ

Flow-based programming

Driving with RAET

Looking at asynchronous programming

Examining the TCP transport

Using the TCP transport

Summary

10. Strategies for Scaling

10. Strategies for Scaling

All about syndication

High availability with multiple masters

Incorporating external data sources

Using the master API

Testing the load in the infrastructure

Summary

11. Monitoring with Salt

11. Monitoring with Salt

Monitoring basics

Monitoring with returners

Using monitoring states

Working with beacons

Setting up alerts

Using aggregate data with Thorium

Summary

12. Exploring Best Practices

12. Exploring Best Practices

Future-proofing your infrastructure

Setting up your directories

The SLS efficiency

Naming conventions

Templates and variables

Summary

13. Troubleshooting Problems

13. Troubleshooting Problems

What the...?

Using salt-call locally

Working with YAML

Asking the community for help

Summary

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...

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