Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

By : Joseph Hall
Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

By: Joseph Hall

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 (14 chapters)

Using Salt's external pillars


Pillar files can be very simple and convenient, and having the ability to template data is very powerful, but sometimes going that route is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. There are a number of situations where going outside of pillar_roots and using an external pillar fits the bill much better.

External pillars are their own type of Salt module, written in Python. You can create your own, but that falls outside the scope of this book. If you would like more information, check out Extending SaltStack, Packt Publishing.

Configuring the etcd pillar

Fortunately, a number of valuable external pillar modules already ship with Salt. For instance, a number of users have begun integrating the etcd configuration database into their infrastructures. When you use the etcd pillar, it might feel as if Salt and etcd were designed for each other!

The etcd pillar does require that you create a configuration block in your master configuration that specifies how...