A good directory structure is important in any platform, and Salt is no different. The default placement of directories inside Salt was very carefully considered in order to maintain the best balance between the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), Linux Standard Base (LSB), and various nuances between different Linux distributions.
As a user, you have a number of directories to contend with yourself, especially when planning both your State files and your Pillar files. There's no official standard inside these directories, but there are some things that you can do to keep your directory trees in good order.
Most Linux distributions place files directly in their appropriate directories. Configuration files and directories live in /etc/, files whose content is variable (logs, caches, and so on) belong directly in /var/, and site-specific files that belong to a network server often go in /srv/(although this can change depending on your...