Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Overview of this book

SaltStack is a powerful configuration management and automation suite designed to manage servers and tens of thousands of nodes. This book showcases Salt as a very powerful automation framework. We will review the fundamental concepts to get you in the right frame of mind, and then explore Salt in much greater depth. You will explore Salt SSH as a powerful tool and take Salt Cloud to the next level. Next, you’ll master using Salt services with ease in your infrastructure. You will discover methods and strategies to scale your infrastructure properly. You will also learn how to use Salt as a powerful monitoring tool. By the end of this book, you will have learned troubleshooting tips and best practices to make the entire process of using Salt pain-free and easy.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering SaltStack Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Naming conventions


An important aspect of the SLS organization is a sensible naming structure. As we have seen, when components are named generically, it is less likely that they will need to be renamed at a later point. However, when a component is named explicitly, it is more likely that a user who is unfamiliar with the SLS tree will understand what it is trying to accomplish.

A good naming convention strives to strike a balance between the oil and water of generic versus explicit. To borrow from the food and chemistry worlds, a good naming convention is the emulsifier that binds everything in a recipe or formula together.

Generic names

Before starting out with an SLS tree, let's try to plan out as many of the primal components as possible. As an example, a modern infrastructure may reasonably include the following components:

  • A load balancer

  • A database server

  • A web server

  • A firewall

  • An application code base

  • An e-mail server

We will start with names that reflect these primal components before moving...