Learning SaltStack

by Colton Myers

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. We’ll finish by exploring how to get involved with salt and what’s 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

202 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2015

Reviews

[Kevin Lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

We've been using Salt in Ops for almost two years now. It's reduced our new server deployment times from weeks to under 10 minutes, and we now can guarantee that every server is exactly the same. It's been absolutely game-changing for us. As the Network Engineer, I didn't have much to do with Salt during that time. That has been changing as I've been trying to apply DevOps principles into the network side of things (it's a brave new world!). Being two years behind, I needed to get up to speed quickly on Salt. This book was the perfect overview/primer on Salt for someone who didn't know a highstate from a topfile. It will walk you step-by-step through the deployment of your first salt master and your first few minions. It will give you examples and overviews of the largest features of Salt, including modules, states, topfiles, environments, Salt-cloud, maps, events, and reactors. It's not a long read, and you shouldn't expect too much depth out of the material, but it is perfect in what it is: a well-written and thought-out primer. I spent the weekend going through the book and examples with a couple of VMs and I now feel confident talking with our Ops team about Salt. I feel confident enough to start writing my own modules and reactors. I also feel confident in my ability to learn more and figure things out on my own through the Salt documentation that the text shows you how to use. If you're brand new to Salt, and you need to get up to speed quickly, this is definitely the way to go.

[Abhishek Jaisingh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short and decent book for introductory reading on learning Salt. It manages to cover a wide range of topics ranging from Salt basics, Infra as Code and Config Management in a concise manner.

Although it is a little dated and could use an updated version, most examples in the book work with small tweaks here and there as the core salt philosophy stays the same.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good introduction to configuration management concepts via Saltstack.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book to get you you familiar with SaltStack.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a so-so overview of SaltStack. It was short, but felt like it could have been shorter. The main recommendation I have is that it gathers an overview into one place.

[Raja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introductory book

Pretty good for beginners. Covers all the basic information about SaltStack. Explained in easy way and lots of practical examples.