Salt provides some very powerful capabilities for interacting with the REST interfaces, both as a client and as a server. When combined with the reactor system, especially, these capabilities change the scope of autonomous operations from being local to the internal infrastructure to being usable with the vast majority of third-party services available today.
Now that we've spent some time looking at some of the more traditional aspects of Salt, it's time to get really serious. The next chapter will focus on Salt's new transmission protocol, Reliable Asynchronous Event Transport, and Salt's pure TCP transport mechanism.