What this book covers

Chapter 1, Essentials Revisited, takes a step back to a few of the basics inside of Salt. These concepts are critical to understanding many of the concepts discussed in this book, and many of them will be explored further in later chapters.

Chapter 2, Diving into Salt Internals, goes in depth with the management of Salt’s own configuration files, how Salt’s loader system works, before finally discussing the state compiler.

Chapter 3, Managing States, builds upon the state concepts from the previous chapter and goes on to discuss how Salt states can be compiled together to form a more cohesive solution for your organization.

Chapter 4, Exploring Salt SSH, will provide you with a basic understanding of Salt’s SSH transport layer, before jumping into a more technical overview of the underlying components.

Chapter 5, Managing Tasks Asynchronously, explores some of the subsystems in Salt that are designed for handling tasks, which interact with each other to achieve an end goal.

Chapter 6, Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems, looks at some of the subsystems in Salt that are designed entirely for data management. The functionality of these subsystems can be utilized by the master or minion, and sometimes both.

Chapter 7, Taking Salt Cloud to the Next Level, brings you an understanding of how Salt interacts with public clouds and how you can extend that interaction to achieve a more cohesive infrastructure definition.

Chapter 8, Using Salt with REST, covers using Salt to communicate over HTTP, both as a client and as a server. With these APIs in place, Salt can either be a cog in another system or be the system that manages the cogs.

Chapter 9, Understanding the RAET and TCP Transports, follows a very technical discussion of various transport layers, both inside and outside of Salt. If you are looking to move beyond the ZeroMQ transport, this chapter is for you.

Chapter 10, Strategies for Scaling, explores a number of subsystems designed to allow Salt to manage large-scale data centers. Even if you are managing a small infrastructure now, I would encourage you to take a look at the options available here: they may just help you rethink your existing infrastructure anyway.

Chapter 11, Monitoring with Salt, explores many of the ways that Salt can be used to extend your own monitoring system and even bring its own monitoring tools to the party.

Chapter 12, Exploring Best Practices, helps you know how to most effectively use Salt in a way that will not only lead to easy management for you, but also for those who work with or follow you.

Chapter 13, Troubleshooting Problems, talks about some of the ways that things can go wrong in Salt and what to do when that happens.