IT Automation with Saltstack - Extended

• Basic Unix/Linux administration knowledge is necessary to grasp the more advanced topics in this course.

Saltstack (Salt for short) is open source software developed to automate the configuration of server systems. During this course you will learn how to centrally administer and manage multiple server environments.

This instructor-led, live training (online or onsite) will be a good mixture of presentations, examples and lab exercises so that you can immediately apply what you have learnt.

Salt Overview

• The goal of SaltStack
• Architectural overview of remote execution
• Salt states
• Grains
• Pillar
• Jinja2 and the virtual mechanism

Introduction to YAML

• Literals, scalars
• Sequences, mappings
• Examples

Installation of Salt

• Installation on Ubuntu
• Differences between salt-common, salt-minion and salt-master
• Installation on Amazon EC2

Salt Command Line Basics

• Anatomy of a salt command
• Output formatting in JSON
• The jq tool

Targeting Minions

• Globbing
• Regular expressions
• List matching
• IP matching
• Grains matching
• Compound matcing
• Examples and exercises

States

• Package management
• Services
• Highstate
• Salt formulas
• Exercises, examples

Templating

• Jinja2 introduction
• For loop, assignments, escaping
• Templating with Jinja2 in Salt, examples

Pillar

• Secure storage
• VNC password deployment example

Extending Salt

• Writing execution modules
• Extending Salt configuration
• Wrapping states around execution modules
• Rendering data
• Handling return data
• Scripting with runners
• Adding external file servers
• Connecting to the cloud
• Monitoring with beacons
• Extending the master （multi-masters)

Other interesting SaltStack concepts

• Environments
• Orchestration
• Integration with Docker
• Salt for windows

Summary and Conclusion