Salt Cloud can be a very powerful tool in the hands of an experienced user. It has moved from its humble beginnings as a simple tool for creating virtual machines to a crucial component of many production infrastructures with complex provisioning needs.

The Salt Cloud configuration can be simple, but it also has the flexibility to be very complex if required. The Salt Bootstrap script is also very powerful but not a one-size-fits-all solution. Fortunately, we can replace it when another solution is better for our needs.

Cloud maps are also very useful for managing infrastructures and they bring with them the power of Salt's renderer system. The reactor system can be used to manage tasks such as starting test suites and updating configuration. Also, when third-party systems manage clouds for you, it is still possible to bring Salt Cloud into the game using autoscale reactors.

In the next chapter, we'll take a look at how Salt works with REST interfaces, both as a client and as a server...