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

Building reactors


Now you have seen what events look like, but what can you do with them? One of the most powerful features that distinguishes Salt from similar systems is not only its ability to fire events, but also the ability for the master to initiate new jobs based on the information contained in the event.

This reactor system serves as a platform for users to build systems that are both asynchronous and autonomous, which can range from simple to very complex.

Configuring reactors

Reactors are master-side processes, so none of the configuration needs to happen directly on any minions. In fact, as the reactor system needs to actively listen to an event bus in order for it to function, it doesn't even make sense to attempt to use it in a masterless environment based on the salt-call commands.

Before setting up the master, decide which directory will contain reactor files. By convention, this will be /srv/reactor/, but this is not a hardcore requirement and is not enforced anywhere in Salt...