6. Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems | Mastering SaltStack

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Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

By : Joseph Hall

4.6 (5)

Mastering SaltStack

4.6 (5)

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.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Essentials Revisited

1. Essentials Revisited

Executing commands remotely

SLS file trees

Using states for configuration management

The basics of grains, pillars, and templates

Summary

2. Diving into Salt Internals

2. Diving into Salt Internals

Understanding the Salt configuration

The renderer

Understanding the loader

Plunging into the state compiler

Summary

3. Managing States

3. Managing States

Handling multiple states

Spanning multiple environments

Understanding master_tops

Using Salt Stack Formulas on GitHub

Using the Salt Package Manager

Summary

4. Exploring Salt SSH

4. Exploring Salt SSH

Grappling with SSH

Using rosters

Understanding the salt-thin agent

Using the raw SSH mode

Summary

5. Managing Tasks Asynchronously

5. Managing Tasks Asynchronously

Looking at the event system

Building reactors

Using Thorium

Using the queue system

Summary

6. Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems

6. Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems

Understanding pillar_roots

Using Salt's external pillars

Understanding SDB

Comparing pillars and SDB

Summary

7. Taking Salt Cloud to the Next Level

7. Taking Salt Cloud to the Next Level

Examining the Salt Cloud configuration

Using SDB with Salt Cloud

Building custom deploy scripts

Taking a look at cloud maps

Using reactors with Salt Cloud

Working with autoscale reactors

Summary

8. Using Salt with REST

8. Using Salt with REST

Looking at Salt's HTTP library

Understanding the Salt API

Working with webhooks

Summary

9. Understanding the RAET and TCP Transports

9. Understanding the RAET and TCP Transports

Comparing RAET and ZeroMQ

Flow-based programming

Driving with RAET

Looking at asynchronous programming

Examining the TCP transport

Using the TCP transport

Summary

10. Strategies for Scaling

10. Strategies for Scaling

All about syndication

High availability with multiple masters

Incorporating external data sources

Using the master API

Testing the load in the infrastructure

Summary

11. Monitoring with Salt

11. Monitoring with Salt

Monitoring basics

Monitoring with returners

Using monitoring states

Working with beacons

Setting up alerts

Using aggregate data with Thorium

Summary

12. Exploring Best Practices

12. Exploring Best Practices

Future-proofing your infrastructure

Setting up your directories

The SLS efficiency

Naming conventions

Templates and variables

Summary

13. Troubleshooting Problems

13. Troubleshooting Problems

What the...?

Using salt-call locally

Working with YAML

Asking the community for help

Summary

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...

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