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.

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Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition
Nov, 2016 | 378 pages
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Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering SaltStack Second Edition
Mastering SaltStack Second Edition
Credits
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Essentials Revisited
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
Diving into Salt Internals
Understanding the Salt configuration
The renderer
Understanding the loader
Plunging into the state compiler
Summary
3
Managing States
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
Exploring Salt SSH
Grappling with SSH
Using rosters
Understanding the salt-thin agent
Using the raw SSH mode
Summary
5
Managing Tasks Asynchronously
Managing Tasks Asynchronously
Looking at the event system
Building reactors
Using Thorium
Using the queue system
Summary
6
Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems
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
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
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
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
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
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
Exploring Best Practices
Future-proofing your infrastructure
Setting up your directories
The SLS efficiency
Naming conventions
Templates and variables
Summary
13
Troubleshooting Problems
Troubleshooting Problems
What the...?
Using salt-call locally
Working with YAML
Asking the community for help
Summary

Using SDB with Salt Cloud

Salt's simple database system was originally designed with a single idea in mind: to keep passwords out of Salt Cloud configuration files. Of course, they were immediately added to other configuration files as well, but that doesn't diminish their use here.

The classic examples of using SDB to store usernames and passwords still apply, of course:

my-provider: 
  username: sdb://myetcd/username 
  password: sdb://myetcd/password

But the new env SDB driver will prove valuable to a number of cloud users who make use of environment variables to store their authentication information.

Using SDB with OpenStack

OpenStack users have been making use of environment variables for years to store their personal cloud configuration. It is very common to set up a shell script that exports OpenStack variables to be used with the standard OpenStack commands. One such script might look like this:

export OS_USERNAME=larry 
export OS_PASSWORD=123pass 
export OS_TENANT_NAME...
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