Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Joseph Hall

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786467393
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Administración de sistemas

Take charge of SaltStack to automate and configure your enterprise-grade environments

About This Book

• Automate tasks effectively and take charge of your infrastructure
• Effectively scale Salt to manage thousands of machines and tackle everyday problems
• Explore Salt's inner workings and advance your knowledge of it

Who This Book Is For

This book is ideal for IT professionals and ops engineers who already manage groups of servers, but would like to expand their knowledge and gain expertise with SaltStack. This book explains the advanced features and concepts of Salt. A basic knowledge of Salt is required in order to get to grips with advanced Salt features.

What You Will Learn

• Automate tasks effectively, so that your infrastructure can run itself
• Start building more complex concepts
• Master user-level internals
• Build scaling strategies
• Explore monitoring strategies
• Learn how to troubleshoot Salt and its subcomponents
• Explore best practices for Salt

In Detail

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.

Style and approach

This book follows a step-by-step conversational tone. Topics are covered in detail through examples and a user-friendly approach.

Mastering SaltStack Second Edition

---

Mastering SaltStack Second Edition

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: August 2015

Second edition: November 2016

Production reference: 1211116

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78646-739-3

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author Joseph Hall	Copy Editor Madhusudan Uchil
Reviewer Peng Yao	Project Coordinator Judie Jose
Commissioning Editor Kartikey Pandey	Proofreader Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Namrata Patil	Indexer Francy Puthiry
Content Development Editor Amedh Pohad	Production Coordinator Shantanu N. Zagade
Technical Editor Mohit Hassija

Foreword

The Mastering SaltStack book is one of my favorite Salt books. This book will get you past the basics of Salt and into what makes it a truly powerful automation framework. Tools like Salt Reactor, Thorium and Salt-SSH allow you to get the most out of Salt. The best ways to take Salt to the next level are revealed in this book, in an easy-to-understand way that will help you solve your problems.

Joseph Hall is likely the best person to write this book. He is not only a close friend, but has also been involved with the Salt project from the very beginning, including the early design of the Salt States system. Joseph is the second person to write code for Salt (apart from me). He was the first engineer hired by SaltStack.

Thomas S. Hatch

Founder and CTO, SaltStack

About the Author

Starting as a support technician and progressing to being a web programmer, QA engineer, systems administrator, Linux instructor, and cloud engineer, Joseph Hall has touched just about every area of the modern technology world. He is currently a senior cloud and integrations engineer at SaltStack. Joseph enjoys working with some of the best minds in the business with his coworkers and SaltStack's partners. He is also the author of Extending SaltStack, Packt Publishing.

You can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/techhat and on GitHub at https://github.com/techhat.

About the Reviewer

Peng Yao is an operations engineer. He is the founder and coordinator of the China SaltStack User Group. He translated Mastering SaltStack to Chinese.

www.PacktPub.com

For support files and downloads related to your book, please visit www.PacktPub.com.

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at [email protected] for more details.

At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

https://www.packtpub.com/mapt

Get the most in-demand software skills with Mapt. Mapt gives you full access to all Packt books and video courses, as well as industry-leading tools to help you plan your personal development and advance your career.

Why subscribe?

• Fully searchable across every book published by Packt
• Copy and paste, print, and bookmark content
• On demand and accessible via a web browser

Preface

I'm very excited to have been given the chance to put this book together. I've been given the rare opportunity to watch Salt grow from an idea in the brain of Tom Hatch to an award-winning open source project, and onward to the flagship product of an award-winning open source company. Salt has become an incredibly powerful framework, which I wish I'd had access to years ago.

Every day, I learn something new about Salt. This book is a collection of a number of those things, aimed at the advanced user. Don't see it as the last word on any of the topics that it covers. Instead, see it as a guide on your journey to use this tool to its fullest potential.

As you read through this book, I hope that the ideas and examples in it inspire you to update and innovate your infrastructure.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Essentials Revisited, takes a step back to a few of the basics inside of Salt. These concepts are critical to understanding many of the concepts discussed in this book, and many of them will be explored further in later chapters.

Chapter 2, Diving into Salt Internals, goes in depth with the management of Salt’s own configuration files, how Salt’s loader system works, before finally discussing the state compiler.

Chapter 3, Managing States, builds upon the state concepts from the previous chapter and goes on to discuss how Salt states can be compiled together to form a more cohesive solution for your organization.

Chapter 4, Exploring Salt SSH, will provide you with a basic understanding of Salt’s SSH transport layer, before jumping into a more technical overview of the underlying components.

Chapter 5, Managing Tasks Asynchronously, explores some of the subsystems in Salt that are designed for handling tasks, which interact with each other to achieve an end goal.

Chapter 6, Taking Advantage of Salt Information Systems, looks at some of the subsystems in Salt that are designed entirely for data management. The functionality of these subsystems can be utilized by the master or minion, and sometimes both.

Chapter 7, Taking Salt Cloud to the Next Level, brings you an understanding of how Salt interacts with public clouds and how you can extend that interaction to achieve a more cohesive infrastructure definition.

Chapter 8, Using Salt with REST, covers using Salt to communicate over HTTP, both as a client and as a server. With these APIs in place, Salt can either be a cog in another system or be the system that manages the cogs.

Chapter 9, Understanding the RAET and TCP Transports, follows a very technical discussion of various transport layers, both inside and outside of Salt. If you are looking to move beyond the ZeroMQ transport, this chapter is for you.

Chapter 10, Strategies for Scaling, explores a number of subsystems designed to allow Salt to manage large-scale data centers. Even if you are managing a small infrastructure now, I would encourage you to take a look at the options available here: they may just help you rethink your existing infrastructure anyway.

Chapter 11, Monitoring with Salt, explores many of the ways that Salt can be used to extend your own monitoring system and even bring its own monitoring tools to the party.

Chapter 12, Exploring Best Practices, helps you know how to most effectively use Salt in a way that will not only lead to easy management for you, but also for those who work with or follow you.

Chapter 13, Troubleshooting Problems, talks about some of the ways that things can go wrong in Salt and what to do when that happens.

What you need for this book

While this book covers a lot of ground, the focus is on Salt. It is recommended ...