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 master_tops


Up until now, we have referred to the top setup exclusively using the top.sls file. But just as other resources in Salt are modular, so is the top subsystem. By default, Salt will obtain top data from the filesystem, but you can also reach out to external resources. These resources may also be referred to as master tops.

Like state files, the only real requirement of a master top is that it return data to Salt in the same format that would be generated by the top.sls file. This format contains a dictionary of environments, each of which has another dictionary containing targets, each of which contains a list of formulas for those targets.

Some of the master tops that ship with Salt are as follows:

  • cobbler: An infrastructure deployment tool based around machine images

  • mongo: A popular NoSQL database solution

  • reclass_adapter: A community project that aims to standardize configuration management between multiple disparate projects, including Salt

  • varstack: A project...