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 Thorium


The Thorium system is another component of Salt with the ability to watch the event bus and react based on what it sees there. But the ideas behind it are much different than with the reactor.

A word on engines

Thorium is one of the engines that started shipping with Salt in version 2016.3. Engines are a type of long-running process that can be written to work with the master or minion. Like other module types, they have access to the Salt configuration and certain Salt subsystems.

Engines are separate processes that are managed by Salt. The event reactor runs inside the Salt processes themselves, which means that long-running reactor operations can affect the rest of Salt. Because Thorium is an engine, it does not suffer from this limitation.

Looking at Thorium basics

Like the reactor, Thorium watches the event bus. But unlike the reactor, which is configured entirely via SLS files, Thorium uses its own subsystem of modules (which are written in Python) and SLS files. Because these...