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

Using the Salt Package Manager


The Salt Package Manager (SPM), was added in version 2015.8 to address a very common problem: the distribution of states and formulas to other systems. You may be tempted to think of SPM only as an extension of Salt Stack Formulas, but that is far from the truth. In fact, there is a much larger need for the distribution of Salt-specific files.

In fact, while Salt Stack Formulas was kept in mind during the development of SPM, the bigger concern were private customers and, in particular, government, military, and other secure organizations that have a need to distribute information in environments that by necessity cannot have a connection to the Internet.

Thinking of SPM as a package manager

Package managers are, in theory, a simple concept. A package is created that contains a set of files to be copied to an individual computer. Older package managers did little more than that, while modern package managers also keep track of file metadata so that installed packages...