Salt Essentials

Preface

Who Should Read This Book

Do you want to automate your infrastructure? What about managing your configuration files? Do you use Python? Salt provides a system to manage simple and complex infrastructures. This book will give you an introduction if you have never used Salt, touching on the major pieces and giving you enough information to feel comfortable in deploying Salt in a major production infrastructure.

Whether you are a sysadmin responsible for the installation and maintenance of the operating system or you are a devops engineer at a startup responsible for getting your code to hundred of systems, Salt is a tool to make your job easier. Salt is used by small and large companies to manage tasks ranging from maintaining the basic operating system parameters and configuration all the way to deploying and configuring custom applications.

Many of the examples in this book assume that you have some basic familiarity with Python and YAML. But knowledge of these technologies is not an absolute requirement. If you have some programming experience and some experience with basic data formats (e.g., JSON or XML), then you should be able to follow along without much trouble. At an even more basic level, you should have some working knowledge of Linux and a basic filesystem layout.

Salt can help you solve a wide variety of problems. One of its best features is that, as with Python, much of Salt’s internals are exposed to you. This book only gives a glimpse into the possibilities ...