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

Understanding the loader


The loader system is at the heart of how Salt works. In a nutshell, Salt is a collection of modules tied together with the loader. Even the transport mechanisms, which enable communication between and define the master, minion, and Syndic hierarchies make use of modules that are managed by the loader.

Dynamic modules

Salt's loader system is a bit unconventional. Traditionally, most software has been designed to require all supported components to be installed. This is not the case with every package, of course. The Apache web server is an example of one project that supports a number of components that need not all be installed. Debian-based operating systems manage Apache modules by providing their modules-available/ and modules-enabled/ directories. Red Hat-based systems take a different approach: all components that are supported by Apache's httpd package are required to be installed with it.

Making such a demand with Salt is beyond unrealistic. So many packages...