An overview of the SaltStack configuration management system from a presentation given at a DevOps meeting.

1. Salt Configuration
Management
SaltStack.com

2. Salt Marketing Points
● Simplicity - Basic Architecture
● Parallel execution
● Secure encryption / authentication
● Open Source: https://github.com/saltstack/salt

3. Architecture
● Salt master: the central management
system.
● Salt minion: a managed system.

4. Execute Commands
● salt ‘*’ cmd.run ‘ls -l /etc’
● salt ‘*’ disk.usage
● salt ‘*’ network.interfaces

5. Salt Command Syntax
Synopsis
salt <target> <module.function> <arguments>
Flags
-E
--pcre
Perl Compatible Reg. Exp. to match on minion name
-G
--grain
Allows targeting by matching predefined values in minion machines
-C
--compound
Allows combining criteria

6. Targeting
● salt ‘minion1’ disk.usage
● salt ‘minion*’ disk.usage
● salt -G ‘os:Ubuntu’ test.ping
● salt -E ‘minion[0-9]’ test.ping
● salt -C ‘G@os:Ubuntu and minion*’ test.ping

8. More definitions...
● Salt States - Scripts that use predefined functions that are run against minions
and tracked - preventing them from running
multiple times.
● Top File - Configures which files to run against which minions

9. Predefined Functions?!? I want to do more
Functions are just Python methods
sorted into modules. You can write your
own if you need to do anything too
complicated or you can be lazy:
https://github.com/saltstack-formulas

10. Sample Modules
on GitHub
● Docker
● Jenkins
● Wordpress
● Apache
● mySQL
● Node
● ...even Salt

11. Pillar
Data assigned to minions using targets
Think configurations for a machine
i.e. Ports, Usernames, Passwords, etc.
Configure different machines to look at different
environments, hostnames, etc.
Applied by template or specified manually:
salt '*' state.apply ftpsync pillar='{"ftpusername": "test"}’

12. Includes
DRY applies here too
EX top of salt state:
include:
- mercurial

13. Ordering & Requisites
Things happen in order from the top file or based on includes…
To get fancy you can have the following:

14. Jinja - Magic Conditionals
Want to make Pillars more than statically assigned to minions?
Refresh the pillar variables and use them in a state file

15. What about my data or modifying files?

16. 5 More Slides… Events
What kind of things can you get notified of
● Periodic Presence Updates - which minions are connected
● Minion Connected
● Minion Disconnnected
● State Completion
● Custom
○ Salt-call event.send /my/test/event ‘{“data”: “my test event”}’

17. Beacons
Trigger events for non-salt related things
● File System Changes
● System Load
● Service Status
● Shell Activity (user login)
● Network and Disk Usage

18. Reacting to Events

20. References
● https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/index.html
● https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/contents.html
● https://linux.die.net/man/1/salt
● https://github.com/saltstack/salt
● https://github.com/saltstack-formulas
● Images stolen shamelessly from Google Image Search