What this book covers
Chapter 1, Salt Architecture and Components, gives you a basic understanding about the concept and architecture of Salt. It explains a lot of Salt terminology, such as the Salt master, minions, states, pillars, environments, and grains, and demonstrates how to configure them.
Chapter 2, Writing Advanced Salt Configurations, goes a bit deeper into Salt configuration and gives you a detailed explanation of the various data manipulation you can perform in Salt, such as conditionals, iterations, and Python functions. It also focuses on the very important topic of targeting minions using different techniques.
Chapter 3, Modules, Orchestration, and Scaling Salt, gives you an even deeper understanding of the advanced Salt concepts of execution and state modules, using templates, requisites, and Salt runners, performing orchestration and demonstrates multi-master setups for redundancy.
Chapter 4, General Administration Tasks, provides hands-on recipes on configuring general system entities, such as users, groups, SSH configurations, scheduling with cron, volume, and disk management with network configuration. It also explains how to add custom grains to a minion.
Chapter 5, Advanced Administration Tasks, provides explanations and demonstrations about advanced system topics such as package repository configuration and package management, file and service management, managing code repositories and handling alternatives.
Chapter 6, Managing Application Servers, gives an understanding of how to configure web and application servers by handling each configuration step-by-step in the recipes. It demonstrates package and service configuration, manages the server configuration file, and deployments for application servers and security for web servers.
Chapter 7, Managing Databases, provides detailed explanations and demonstrations of database configuration for MySQL and PostgreSQL. It includes database package and service management, managing users and groups, databases, grants and queries.
Chapter 8, Configuring Salt Cloud, provides extensive knowledge about how to manage cloud infrastructures using Salt Cloud. It demonstrates the usage of Salt Cloud, providers and profiles, cloud maps, post-install scripts, and management of cloud resources such as instances and volumes using Salt Cloud.
Chapter 9, Managing Amazon Web Services, focuses specifically on how to manage the EC2 Cloud hosted by Amazon Web Services. It includes recipes to manage security groups, load balancers, DNS with Route53, Simple Queue Service, ElastiCache clusters and CloudWatch alarms.
Chapter 10, Salt Event and Reactor System, explains and demonstrates the event system of Salt and how to request and receive events using the Salt message bus. It also explains how to use the event system to configure the reactor system in Salt to perform required tasks.
Chapter 11, Troubleshooting, demonstrates several scenarios where things can go wrong with the Salt system and how you can troubleshoot and fix such problems.
