Learning SaltStack, 2nd Edition

Key Features

• First book in the market to incorporate all the latest features of SaltStack.
• Leverage the power of SaltStack for building, managing and securing your infrastructure.
• Effectively use commands and control the state of your infrastructure in a jiffy.

Book Description

SaltStack is one of the best infrastructure management platforms available. It provides powerful tools for defining and enforcing the state of your infrastructure in a clear, concise way. With this book learn how to use these tools for your own infrastructure by understanding the core pieces of Salt.

In this book we will take you from the initial installation of Salt, through running their first commands, and then talk about extending Salt for individual use cases. From there you will explore the state system inside of Salt, learning to define the desired state of our infrastructure in such a way that Salt can enforce that state with a single command. Finally, you will learn about some of the additional tools that salt provides, including salt-cloud, the reactor, and the event system. Well finish by exploring how to get involved with salt and whats new in the salt community.

Finally, by the end of the book, you’ll be able to build a reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure and fully utilize the power of cloud computing.

What you will learn

• Install Salt on your servers
• Run commands on all or some of your minions instantly from a central managing server
• Write custom Salt modules to handle your infrastructure’s unique needs
• Define the state of your infrastructure and use Salt to enforce that state.
• Create platform-agnostic state definitions for greater flexibility and power
• Manage virtual servers on public or private clouds using Salt Cloud
• Use the event system in Salt to create a reactive and self-healing infrastructure

About the Author

Colton Myers is a software engineer living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Since graduating with a BS in computer science from the University of Utah, he has worked professionally writing software in Python. Colton loves working on open source software, and has represented the US PyCon conference as a speaker multiple times.

He is a SaltStack Certified Trainer and has worked on the Salt open source software for years. At the time of writing this book, Colton was working as a core engineer for SaltStack.

You can find him on Twitter and GitHub at @basepi.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Diving In – Our First Salt Commands
Chapter 2. Controlling Your Minions with Remote Execution
Chapter 3. Execution Modules – Write Your Own Solution
Chapter 4. Defining the State of Your Infrastructure
Chapter 5. Expanding Our States with Jinja2 and Pillar
Chapter 6. The Highstate and Environments
Chapter 7. Using Salt Cloud to Manage Virtual Minions
Chapter 8. The Reactor and the Event System
Chapter 9. Security Best Practices in Salt
Chapter 10. How Can I Get Involved?