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

The renderer


While the main master and minion configuration files must necessarily be stored in YAML, other files in Salt can take advantage of the wealth of file formats that the modern world of technology has to offer. This is because of the rendering system built into Salt, which can take files of arbitrary formats and render them into a structure that is usable by Salt.

Rendering SLS files

By default, all SLS files in Salt are rendered twice: first through the Jinja templating engine and then through the PyYAML library. This provides some significant advantages:

  • Jinja provides a fast and powerful templating system is easy to understand and use and follows a Pythonic mindset, comfortable to many administrators. It is particularly well suited for managing YAML files.

  • YAML has a very shallow learning curve, making it easy to learn and understand. While it does support more complex syntax, such as parentheses, brackets, and braces (JSON is technically syntactically correct YAML), it is not...