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

Understanding the Salt configuration


One of the basic ideas around the Salt configuration is that a configuration management system should require as little configuration as possible. A concerted effort has been made by the developers to assign defaults that will apply to as many deployments as possible while still allowing users to fine-tune the settings to their own needs.

If you are just starting with Salt, you may not need to change anything. In fact, most of the time, the master configuration will be exactly what is needed for a small installation, while minions will require almost no changes, if any.

Following the configuration tree

By default, most operating system (primarily Linux-based ones) will store the Salt configuration in the /etc/salt/ms (primarily Linux-based ones) will store the Salt configuration in the /etc/salt/ directory. Unix distributions will often use the /usr/local/etc/salt/ directory instead, while Windows uses the C:\salt\ directory. These locations were chosen...