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-thin agent


As it turns out, automating SSH commands is not as simple as it may look at first. In an environment where every server runs exactly the same version of exactly the same operating system and exactly the same pieces of software, executing remote commands can be greatly simplified. However, very few environments meet this requirement, and Salt was designed to handle multiple environments.

In order to accommodate these disparate configurations, the code that performs the tasks needs to be able to autodetect pieces of its environment and then execute the tasks required by the user. In short, a piece of software that behaves exactly like Salt is necessary. Fortunately, in the Salt environment, that software is already available.

The salt-thin agent was designed to be a lightweight version of Salt that could be quickly copied to a remote system by Salt SSH in order to perform tasks. It doesn't ship with Salt (not as such, at least). It is built as needed by Salt...