Utilizing SaltStack to configure SELinux
The second orchestration and automation framework we'll consider is SaltStack, which has commercial backing by the SaltStack company. SaltStack uses a declarative language similar to Ansible and is also written in Python. In this chapter, we will use the open source SaltStack framework, but an enterprise version of SaltStack is available as well, which adds more features on top of the open source one.
How SaltStack works
SaltStack, often also described as just Salt, is an automation framework that uses an agent/server model for its integrations. Unlike Ansible, SaltStack generally requires agent installations on the target nodes (called minions) and activation of the minion daemons to enable communications to the master. This communication is encrypted, and the minion authentication uses public-key validation, which needs to be approved on the master to ensure no rogue minions participate in a SaltStack environment.
While agent...