Network Automation at Scale

Chapter 2. Preparing the Salt Environment

This chapter focuses on the essential steps for preparing the environment to start automating using Salt. We will first present some of the most important Salt-specific keywords and their meaning. Following that, we’ll take a look at the main configuration files used to control the behavior of Salt’s processes. Finally, we’ll review the processes startup, which implies the completion of the environment setup.

Salt Nomenclature

Salt comes with a particular nomenclature that requires a careful review of the documentation to fully understand. In general the documentation is very good and complete, very often providing usage examples, however much of it is written for an audience that already knows Salt basics and only needs to know how a particular module or interface is configured or called.

Pillar

Pillar is free-form data that can be used to organize configuration values or manage sensitive data. It is an entity of data that can be either stored locally using the filesystem, or using external systems such as databases, Vault, Amazon S3, Git, and many other resources (see “Using External Pillar”). Simple examples of pillar data include a list of NTP peers, interface details, and BGP configuration.

When defined as SLS files they follow the methodologies described under “Extensible and Scalable Configuration Files: SLS”, and the data type is therefore a Jinja/YAML combination, by default, but different formats can be used if desired. For ...