Examining the Salt Cloud configuration

Some of the biggest evidence of how much Salt Cloud has grown resides in its configuration files. Early versions supported several cloud providers, but only one account per provider. It quickly became clear that a number of users did in fact make use of multiple accounts. Let's take a few minutes to look at the basics of how Salt Cloud configuration files work now.

Global configurations

The basis of the Salt Cloud configuration resides in the main configuration file, which is normally found at /etc/salt/cloud. This file used to be very central to the operation of Salt Cloud, but nowadays, there are very few options that can only be used here. We'll cover these later in Global configurations; for now, we'll focus on the global aspect of this file.

Salt Cloud has been designed with a top-down configuration mindset. Configurations defined in each type of the configuration file are available in the next configuration set, unless overridden. The order of operation...