Book Image

Learning SaltStack - Second Edition

By : Colton Myers
Book Image

Learning SaltStack - Second Edition

By: Colton Myers

Overview of this book

SaltStack is one of the best infrastructure management platforms available. It provides powerful tools for defining and enforcing the state of your infrastructure in a clear, concise way. With this book learn how to use these tools for your own infrastructure by understanding the core pieces of Salt. In this book we will take you from the initial installation of Salt, through running their first commands, and then talk about extending Salt for individual use cases. From there you will explore the state system inside of Salt, learning to define the desired state of our infrastructure in such a way that Salt can enforce that state with a single command. Finally, you will learn about some of the additional tools that salt provides, including salt-cloud, the reactor, and the event system. We?ll finish by exploring how to get involved with salt and what'?s new in the salt community. Finally, by the end of the book, you'll be able to build a reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure and fully utilize the power of cloud computing.

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Learning SaltStack - Second Edition
Colton Myers
Jun, 2016 | 202 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning SaltStack Second Edition
Learning SaltStack Second Edition
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Diving In – Our First Salt Commands
Diving In – Our First Salt Commands
Introducing Salt
Installing Salt
Configuring Salt
A game of ping pong
Masterless Salt
Summary
2
Controlling Your Minions with Remote Execution
Controlling Your Minions with Remote Execution
The structure of a remote execution command
Summary
3
Execution Modules – Write Your Own Solution
Execution Modules – Write Your Own Solution
Exploring the source
An advanced example
Summary
4
Defining the State of Your Infrastructure
Defining the State of Your Infrastructure
Our first state
The pieces of a state declaration
Expanding to encompass multiple pieces of state
Dependencies using requisites
Summary
5
Expanding Our States with Jinja2 and Pillar
Expanding Our States with Jinja2 and Pillar
Adding a new minion
Jinja2
Defining secure minion-specific data in pillar
Summary
6
The Highstate and Environments
The Highstate and Environments
The highstate
Storing our states in Git with GitFS
Summary
7
Using Salt Cloud to Manage Virtual Minions
Using Salt Cloud to Manage Virtual Minions
Setting up Salt Cloud
Managing groups of VMs with map files
Summary
8
The Reactor and the Event System
The Reactor and the Event System
The Salt event system
Reacting to events
Summary
9
Security Best Practices in Salt
Security Best Practices in Salt
Securing Salt configuration
Key management
Firewall and network configuration
Summary
10
How Can I Get Involved?
How Can I Get Involved?
Contributing code using GitHub
Other ways to get involved
Summary
Index
Index

The pieces of a state declaration

Just as with our remote execution commands, state declarations can be broken up into multiple pieces. Here is our state from before:

install_apache:
  pkg.installed:
    - name: apache2

Here is information about how the pieces line up and what each piece of the state declaration is called:

<ID Declaration>:
  <State Module>.<Function>:
    - name: <name>
    - <Function Arg>
    - <Function Arg>
    - <Function Arg>
    - <Requisite Declaration>:
      - <Requisite Reference>

The preceding reference and more advanced examples can be found in the Salt documentation at http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/highstate.html#large-example.

We haven't talked about requisites yet, so ignore that section for the moment.

We start with the ID of our state. This is a string that must be unique across all of the states we are running at a given time. Note that it doesn't have to follow stringent requirements like...

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