Salt Essentials - by Craig Sebenik & Thomas Hatch (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Get a complete introduction to Salt, the widely used Python-based configuration management and remote execution tool. This practical guide not only shows system administrators how to manage complex infrastructures with Salt, but also teaches developers how to use Salt to deploy and manage their applications.

Written by two Salt experts, this book provides the information you need to deploy Salt in a production infrastructure right away. You'll also learn how to customize Salt and use salt-cloud to manage your virtualization. If you have experience with Linux and data formats such as JSON or XML, you're ready to get started.

• Understand what Salt can do, and get a high-level overview of basic commands
• Learn how execution modules let you interact with many systems at once
• Use states to define how you want a host or a set of hosts to look
• Dive into grains and pillars, Salt's basic data elements
• Control your infrastructure programmatically by extending Salt Master's functionality
• Extend Salt with custom modules, the Jinja templating language, and Python scripts

About the Author

Craig Sebenik was responsible for the Salt infrastructure while at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is still one of the largest deployments of Salt in the world today. He is now at a startup, Matterport, using Salt in the cloud and with a small team of developers. Working in companies both large and small has given him rare insight into the use of Salt, and being involved since version 0.8 has given Craig a front-row seat for the evolution of Salt through the years.

Thomas S Hatch is the creator of Salt and CTO of SaltStack. Thomas is still the largest contributor to the Salt project despite the fact that Salt is now the largest developer community in DevOps.