Introduction

Until now, we have seen how Salt can help us configure our infrastructure, such as servers, applications, databases, and so on. However, the capabilities of Salt don't just stop here. Salt has extensive support for all the major cloud service providers available today, and can interact with the cloud provider to provide a scalable and flexible cloud deployment method.

Salt cloud makes use of all the parameters and options available in the service provider API services, and provides us with a common interface to interact with as many environments as we wish to. As of now, Salt cloud supports cloud providers, such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, Azure, HP cloud, OpenStack, DigitalOcean, GoGrid, Linode, and many others.

In this chapter, we will start with the basics of the Salt cloud functionality, move on to its terminologies and features one at a time, explore each feature in depth, and move toward the successful deployment of a Amazon EC2 infrastructure.