Now that we have gotten our hands dirty with the basics of Salt, in this chapter we are going to dive deep into the advanced configuration of Salt.

One of the notable features of Salt is flexibility, and being based on the dynamic Python language, Salt allows us to incorporate and take advantage of a large number of Python utilities into its configurations. Like most other programming languages and configuration management utilities, it's quite obvious that without the ability to manipulate our data, such as making decisions based on system properties, performing the same task quickly and efficiently for multiple entities of the same type, a tool is not of much use to users.

In this chapter, you will explore all the advanced features of Salt and how you can utilize them to automate systems efficiently and optimally.