Using SDB with Salt Cloud

Salt's simple database system was originally designed with a single idea in mind: to keep passwords out of Salt Cloud configuration files. Of course, they were immediately added to other configuration files as well, but that doesn't diminish their use here.

The classic examples of using SDB to store usernames and passwords still apply, of course:

my-provider: 
  username: sdb://myetcd/username 
  password: sdb://myetcd/password 

But the new env SDB driver will prove valuable to a number of cloud users who make use of environment variables to store their authentication information.

Using SDB with OpenStack

OpenStack users have been making use of environment variables for years to store their personal cloud configuration. It is very common to set up a shell script that exports OpenStack variables to be used with the standard OpenStack commands. One such script might look like this:

export OS_USERNAME=larry 
export OS_PASSWORD=123pass 
export OS_TENANT_NAME...