Salt is more than just configuration management or remote execution: it is a powerful platform that not only gives you unique tools to manage your infrastructure, but also the power to create new tools to fit your infrastructure's unique needs. However, everything starts with the foundation of lightning-fast remote execution, so that's where we will start.

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

This book assumes that you already have root access on a device with a common distribution of Linux installed. The machine used in the examples in this book is running Ubuntu 14.04 unless otherwise stated. Most examples should run on other major distributions, such as recent versions of Fedora, RHEL 5/6 or Arch Linux.