What is Salt?
Salt is:
- a configuration management system, capable of maintaining remote nodes in defined states (for example, ensuring that specific packages are installed and specific services are running)
- a distributed remote execution system used to execute commands and query data on remote nodes, either individually or by arbitrary selection criteria
Why use Salt?
Because it:
- Simplicity: Providing versatility between massive scale deployments and smaller systems may seem daunting, but Salt is very simple to set up and maintain, regardless of the size of the project. The architecture of Salt is designed to work with any number of servers, from a handful of local network systems to international deployments across different datacenters. The topology is a simple server/client model with the needed functionality built into a single set of daemons. While the default configuration will work with little to no modification, Salt can be fine tuned to meet specific needs.
- Parallel execution: enable commands to remote systems to be called in parallel rather than serially
- Building on proven technology: Salt takes advantage of a number of technologies and techniques. The networking layer is built with the excellent ZeroMQ networking library, so the Salt daemon includes a viable and transparent AMQ broker. Salt uses public keys for authentication with the master daemon, then uses faster AES encryption for payload communication; authentication and encryption are integral to Salt. Salt takes advantage of communication via msgpack, enabling fast and light network traffic.
- Fast, flexible, scalable: The result is a system that can execute commands at high speed on target server groups ranging from one to very many servers. Salt is very fast, easy to set up, amazingly malleable and provides a single remote execution architecture that can manage the diverse requirements of any number of servers. The Salt infrastructure brings together the best of the remote execution world, amplifies its capabilities and expands its range, resulting in a system that is as versatile as it is practical, suitable for any network.
- Security: Authentication (Public keys), Only if you want (on by default), Encryption (AES)
Tutorial: Use salt to install and configure nginx with template config base on debian 7 wheezy at https://github.com/devopsa/salt_config
Comments
Post a Comment