Preface

Salt is one of the many but unique tools available today for configuration management and orchestration. Salt not only enables us to seamlessly configure our infrastructure, but also to perform all sorts of tasks based on a variety of conditions and properties of the Salt minions. Along with super-fast module execution with the help of the ZeroMQ messaging library, Salt takes orchestration to a whole new level, which can be used for numerous day-to-day tasks starting from simple data collection to complex deployments.

This book provides a hands-on approach to the world of Salt. It provides a basic understanding of the concepts and architecture on which Salt is based, and then moves on to details about configuring it and also writing complex recipes for different tasks and scenarios.

The content of the book definitely helps professionals associated with infrastructure management to consider Salt as a potential tool for implementing their infrastructure and it also provides lot of recipes which existing Salt users can refer to. With the help of the content of the book, users can also integrate Salt with other tools and services to get the optimal results required.

The book starts off with the concepts and architecture of Salt, followed by some basic and advanced configurations and module usages. The next topics are about configuring application and database servers, cloud-based services, and event systems. It finishes off with recipes for troubleshooting Salt.