Salt Cloud is a project that was started to work closely with Salt to manage cloud virtual machines. As infrastructures move more and more to the cloud, it's useful to have an easy-to-use, powerful abstraction around cloud provider APIs that allows us to manage them with Salt.

Starting with the 2014.1.0 release of Salt, Salt Cloud is built into Salt, rather than being kept as a separate project. However, on certain distributions, you still might have to install the salt-cloud package in order to get all of the relevant files.

However, on our Ubuntu system, this is not the case—Salt Cloud was installed when we installed the Salt master. That said, depending on your method of installation, you might have to install libcloud using the following command:

# sudo apt-get install python-libcloud

Before we configure Salt Cloud, however, we need to decide which cloud provider we are going to use, set up an account, and get some information from that cloud provider.

In the examples...