1. Intro to Config Management Using Salt Open Source
Salt - it makes everything better!

2. Config Management Tools: Chef, Puppet, Salt, Ansible
Purpose: Ensure the design and build state of a system is known, good, & trusted
Benefits:
Self-documenting
Improves consistency, efficiency, and reliability once established
Faster problem resolution
History of changes (if stored in git)
Ability to enforce controls (pull requests, approvals, etc.)

3. Why Not Ansible? vs. Agentless? Speed Functionality
Not exactly
Salt-SSH
Speed
SSH vs. ZeroMQ
Functionality
Grains, encrypted pillars, events & orchestration, salt mine, etc.
Clean and clear code
vs.

4. I could be totally wrong...
Why Not Ansible?
I could be totally wrong...

5. Any CM is better than no CM.
Why Not Ansible?
but that’s OK!
Any CM is better than no CM.

6. Salt Overview Salt Master Salt Minions Execution Modules
States (Formulas)
Grains
Pillar
Top File
Runners
Returners
Reactor
Salt Cloud / Salt Virt
Salt SSH

7. Central management system
Central management system. This system is used to send commands and configurations to the Salt minion that is running on managed systems.

8. Managed system.
This system runs the Salt minion which receives commands and configuration from the Salt master.

9. Salt Flexibility Agent & Server Agent-Only (Masterless)
Server-Only (Agentless, i.e. Salt-SSH)

10. Execution Modules
Ad hoc commands executed from the command line against one or more managed systems. Useful for:
Real-time monitoring, status, and inventory
One-off commands and scripts
Deploying critical updates

11. States (Formulas) /srv/salt
A declarative or imperative representation of a system configuration.

12. Grains
Grains are static information about the underlying managed system and include operating system, memory, and many other system properties. You can also define custom grains for any system.

13. Pillar
User-defined variables. These secure variables are defined and stored on the Salt Master and then ‘assigned’ to one or more minions using targets. Salt pillar data stores values such as ports, file paths, configuration parameters, and passwords. You can use GPG to encrypt values/file contents as well.

14. Top File Matches formulas and Salt pillar data to Salt minions.
/srv/salt/vim.sls
/srv/salt/top.sls
Matches formulas and Salt pillar data to Salt minions.
/srv/salt/apache.sls

15. Runners
Modules that execute on the Salt master to perform supporting tasks. Salt runners report job status, connection status, read data from external APIs, query connected Salt minions, and more.
For example, the Orchestrate runner coordinates configuration deployments across many systems.

16. Returners
Send data returned by Salt minions to another system, such as a database. Salt returners can run on the Salt minion or on the Salt master.

17. Reactor
Trigger reactions when events occur in your SaltStack environment.

18. Salt Cloud / Salt Virt
Provision systems on cloud providers / hypervisors and immediately bring them under management.

19. Salt SSH
Run Salt commands over SSH on systems that do not have a Salt minion. This is Ansible’s approach for everything.

20. Salt Overview Salt Master Salt Minions Execution Modules
States (Formulas)
Grains
Pillar
Top File
Runners
Returners
Reactor
Salt Cloud / Salt Virt
Salt SSH

21. Getting Started Salt Bootstrap or see https://repo.saltstack.com
Salt Master (Server) curl -L -o install_salt.sh sudo sh install_salt.sh -P -M Open ports 4505 & 4506 to servers
Salt Minions curl -L -o install_salt.sh sudo sh install_salt.sh -P -A saltmaster.domain.com
Accept keys on Salt Master salt-key -A (and verify the list before saying yes…)

22. The Cool Stuff Remote Execution Targeting Globbing ‘web*’
Regex -E ‘web1-(prod|dev)’
Lists -L ‘web1,db1,proxy1’
Grains or Pillars -G ‘os_family:RedHat’
Compound -C ‘* and not
Node Groups -N critical (defined in master config, i.e. /etc/salt/master.d/nodes.conf)
IPs/subnets -S or -S /24

23. The Cool Stuff - LIVE DEMO!!!
Remote Execution
test.ping
test.version
status.version
cmd.run
disk.percent
cron.ls root
grains.items
firewalld.list_all
pkg.upgrade

24. The Cool Stuff - LIVE DEMO!!!
Runners (survey.diff)
salt-run survey.diff '*' cmd.run 'cat /etc/resolv.conf'

25. The Cool Stuff - LIVE DEMO!!!
Config Management
States, Formulas, Pillar state.show_top state.show_highstate pillar.items state.apply

26. The Cool Stuff
Config Management
GPG/PGP

27. The Cool Stuff
Config Management
Jinja, Files

28. The Cool Stuff - (SORT OF) LIVE DEMO!!!
Salt Cloud
salt-cloud -m /etc/salt/cloud.maps.d/demo.map
salt-cloud -m /etc/salt/cloud.maps.d/demo.map -d
games.paulw.io

29. Getting Started - Tips Start Slow & Simple
Users
Cron jobs
Manage a file served from the Salt master
Manage a file or directory from a git repo
Manage firewall rules
Learn to use formulas (
Test! - salt ‘minion_id’ state.apply test=true
Take snapshots before applying states (if using VMs)
Ask for help - Salt Community
Level up your Salt
GPG encrypted pillars for secrets (see here)
GitFS backend or Git repo with automated pulls on commits

30. Getting Started - Tutorials & Documentation

31. Questions? pdw@udel.edu github.com/pauldalewilliams
Salt - it makes everything better!