What is saltstack

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Network Monitoring. What is SaltStack? The Salt Architecture The master-slave architecture of Salt enables it to work as both a push and a pull system. Here are some of the important components of Salt Architecture: Salt Master: This is the server that communicates with agents installed on endpoints known as minions. Minions : Minions are optional Salt agents that are installed on all managed nodes to execute commands and report information back to the Salt Master.

Grains : Minions receive the information about a target device in the form of grains. The grain interface provide system information such as the OS, memory, domain name, kernel, IP address etc.

Pillars : A pillar is a file that stores the configuration details. Salt Reactors : A salt reactor is a component that listens to events.

Related: Setting Up Your First Puppet Master Server Salt is a modular event-based system where events are driven into the message bus and the salt reactors deal with them following the pre-defined configurations. Comments Comments are disabled in preview mode. Thanks for subscribing! Subscribe to our Blog Let's stay in touch! Register to receive our blog updates. Georgia and S. Sandwich Is. In this chapter, we will learn the basics of SaltStack.

Salt configuration management establishes a master-minion model to quickly, very easily, flexibly and securely bringing infrastructure components in line with a given policy.

Salt is a very powerful automation framework. Salt architecture is based on the idea of executing commands remotely. All networking is designed around some aspect of remote execution. This could be as simple as asking a Remote Web Server to display a static Web page, or as complex as using a shell session to interactively issue commands against a remote server.

Salt is an example of one of the more complex types of remote execution. Salt is designed to allow users to explicitly target and issue commands to multiple machines directly.

Salt is based around the idea of a Master, which controls one or more Minions. Commands are normally issued from the Master to a target group of Minions, which then execute the tasks specified in the commands and then return the resulting data back to the Master. Communications between a master and minions occur over the ZeroMQ message bus.

SaltStack modules communicate with the supported minion operating systems. The Salt Master and the minions use keys to communicate. When a minion connects to a master for the first time, it automatically stores keys on the master. SaltStack is built for speed and scale. With orchestration capability, it is now possible to define the infrastructure as code. Salt helps organizations automate routine IT jobs such as adding or removing users and updating servers with a single command.

All of this is possible through its robust remote execution framework. The remote execution framework is made up of execution modules that ship with Salt. Finally, Salt helps organizations secure their infrastructure. In my previous role, I spent a significant part of my career building software that assessed vulnerabilities and configuration drift, detected malware, and monitored a wide variety of other security issues. Salt is perfectly designed to solve that part of the problem.

This also happens to be the area of the SaltStack product line I will help manage. Please drop us a note at product saltstack. Salt is designed from the ground up to integrate with a variety of applications and services. It can also be configured to return the data from jobs to a third-party data source referred to as the Salt Returner such as S3 or the PostgreSQL database for example.

The combination of all these capabilities makes Salt a great candidate to play the role of conductor in this complex symphony of systems, code, and components we all now rely on as modern IT infrastructure. Our virtual user conference SaltConf21 will be November ! Register Now! What is SaltStack? By Mehul Revankar — originally published on Oct 19, I recently accepted a product management role for SaltStack, the SecOps IT automation and orchestration software company, after spending a good part of my career at a cyber security company assessing software vulnerabilities, evaluating configuration issues, detecting malware, and dealing with a host of other security-related issues.

Monitor Beacons Salt Minions can be configured to monitor files, processes, services, and a host of other things. Respond Reactor Perhaps the most powerful feature of Salt is its ability to react to events and take actions using the Salt Reactor system.