Learning SaltStack - Second Edition (PDF)

Build, manage, and secure your infrastructure by utilizing the power of SaltStack

• First book in the market to incorporate all the latest features of SaltStack.


• Leverage the power of SaltStack for building, managing and securing your infrastructure.


• Effectively use commands and control the state of your infrastructure in a jiffy.

This book is aimed at System Administrators who are looking forward to manage their infrastructure using SaltStack with no prior knowledge about it.

• Install Salt on your servers


• Run commands on all or some of your minions instantly from a central managing server


• Write custom Salt modules to handle your infrastructure's unique needs


• Define the state of your infrastructure and use Salt to enforce that state.


• Create platform-agnostic state definitions for greater flexibility and power


• Manage virtual servers on public or private clouds using Salt Cloud


• Use the event system in Salt to create a reactive and self-healing infrastructure

SaltStack is one of the best infrastructure management platforms available. It provides powerful tools for defining and enforcing the state of your infrastructure in a clear, concise way. With this book learn how to use these tools for your own infrastructure by understanding the core pieces of Salt.

In this book we will take you from the initial installation of Salt, through running their first commands, and then talk about extending Salt for individual use cases. From there you will explore the state system inside of Salt, learning to define the desired state of our infrastructure in such a way that Salt can enforce that state with a single command. Finally, you will learn about some of the additional tools that salt provides, including salt-cloud, the reactor, and the event system. Well finish by exploring how to get involved with salt and what's new in the salt community.

Finally, by the end of the book, you'll be able to build a reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure and fully utilize the power of cloud computing.

This will be a comprehensive guide on SaltStack along with installation and setting up of Salt on couple of platforms. Then enlightening the readers about remote execution system and configuration management system and ending with concepts of security and best practices.