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

Grappling with SSH


SSH is in fact based on concepts very different from the primary architecture of Salt. Salt was designed to communicate with large numbers of remote machines at once; SSH was designed to interact with only one at a time. Let's take a few minutes to examine some of the differences between Salt and SSH.

Remote shells

Let's take a step back in time to when the Internet wasn't around yet and the ARPANET was brand new. To accompany this new concept to nationally and globally interconnected networks, a series of new protocols was introduced. Telnet, a communication mechanism to take advantage of them, was also introduced. Internet protocols were based on telnet, including a remote shell.

As security needs grew, so did the need to secure telnet. SSH was born; eventually, the OpenSSH project was broadly shipped and supported by a number of Unix-based platforms. While SSH means Secure Shell, it was in fact designed to securely tunnel applications that had traditionally communicated...