Learning SaltStack - Second Edition by Colton Myers

Key FeaturesFirst 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 DescriptionSaltStack 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, youll be able to build a reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure and fully utilize the power of cloud computing.What you will learnInstall Salt on your serversRun commands on all or some of your minions instantly from a central managing serverWrite custom Salt modules to handle your infrastructures unique needsDefine the state of your infrastructure and use Salt to enforce that state.Create platform-agnostic state definitions for greater flexibility and powerManage virtual servers on public or private clouds using Salt CloudUse the event system in Salt to create a reactive and self-healing infrastructureAbout the AuthorColton 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. He loves working on open source software and has made multiple appearances as a speaker at the US PyCon conference.Colton is a SaltStack Certified Trainer and has worked on the Salt open source software for years. He was previously a core engineer at SaltStack. At the time this book was published, he was a Python developer and systems engineer at Adobe.Find him on Twitter and Github at @basepi.Table of ContentsDiving In – Our First Salt CommandsControlling Your Minions with Remote ExecutionExecution Modules – Write Your Own SolutionDefining the State of Your InfrastructureExpanding Our States with Jinja2 and PillarThe Highstate and EnvironmentsUsing Salt Cloud to Manage Virtual MinionsThe Reactor and the Event SystemSecurity Best Practices in SaltHow Can I Get Involved?