Salt - The New Configuration Management Tool

These are a PDF Printout of the presentation. The PDF Conversion didn't really go all that well, so I highly recommend looking at the HTML5 slides. The HTML5 slides can be found here:

http://www.justincarmony.com/slides/salt-intro/

While there are several popular configuration management tools such as puppet and chef, there is a new kid on the block: Salt. In this presentation we’ll learn about how salt uniquely approaches remote execution and configuration management and just how fast it is. We’ll show you how to get started up in minutes and easily manage multiple servers. We’ll discuss some of the differences between salt and others like puppet and chef. Finally, time permitting, we’ll discuss how to write custom modules to extend salt much easier than others.

So come see why Salt is one of the fastest growing projects on GitHub, and why small startups and even large corporations are making the switch to salt.

Transcript

1. INTRO TO SALTSTACK
   THE NEW CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
   Presented by /
   Justin Carmony @JustinCarmony
   

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2. Slides split up into multiple sections.
   Slides both vertical and horizontal.
   

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3. Test Vertical Slide
   

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4. ABOUT PRESENTER
   Director of Development
   @ Deseret Digital Media
   President of Utah PHP Usergroup
   8+ years of professional web development
   Goofy dad
   

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7. ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION
   Slides & code examples will be posted online
   Feel free to ask on-topic questions
   We'll have time for questions at the end
   Feel free to talk and/or contact me
   afterward the presentation
   

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8. OUR GOAL
   Understand Some Server Challenges Facing Teams
   Basic introduction to Salt about what it does
   Live demo on how it can help solve common problems
   Get you excited to go try out & learn more about salt
   

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9. LETS START
   WITH A STORY
   

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10. YOU'RE A HAPPY DEVELOPER
    

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11. YOU'RE PART OF A
    

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12. SMALL TEAM OF DEVS
    

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13. YOU HAVE A NEW WEBSITE
    

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14. ON A SMALL CLOUD SERVER
    

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15. YOU START GETTING LOTS OF USERS ...
    

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16. ... AND YOU NEED TO QUICKLY SCALE.
    

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17. YOU ASK YOUR BOSS TO HIRE A SYS ADMIN.
    "WE DON'T HAVE THE BUDGET!"
    

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18. SO YOUR TEAM DECIDES TO ASK:
    

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19. ... AND YOU START DEPLOYING MORE SERVERS ...
    

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20. ... AND SOME MORE ...
    

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21. ... AND MAYBE JUST A FEW MORE ...
    

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22. UNTIL IT IS A GIANT MESS!
    

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23. SCENARIO: JOHN GETS FIRED
    

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24. YOU HAVE A DOZEN SERVERS
    HE HAS SSH KEYS ON HALF OF THEM.
    

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25. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ENSURE YOU'VE
    REVOKED HIS ACCESS EVERYWHERE?
    

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26. THE PROBLEM:
    AD-HOC SERVER MANAGEMENT
    

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27. THE CLOUD
    Doesn't Require a Sys Admin
    Simple to deploy many servers
    But complex to solve large scaling issues
    Long-term management requires
    fore-thought & planning
    

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28. THE DEVELOPER
    Can relatively easily setup a production environment
    Typically doesn't know how to manage many servers long-
    term
    Busy programming, last priority is "sysadmin stuff"
    

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29. THE BUSINESS
    Hard to justify a "Sys Admin"
    when devs can do "okay" job.
    Usually hit scaling problems
    before profitability
    

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30. THE SOLUTION:
    DEVELOPERS NEED TO THINK LIKE OPS
    

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31. DEVOPS
    We've been putting more dev into ops,
    but we need to put more ops into dev.
    Ops is a state of mind.
    — Theo Schlossnagle
    CEO, OmniTI
    “
    

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32. NEED TO APPLY BEST PRACTICES
    FOR SERVER ENVIRONMENTS
    Source Control for Configuration
    Ensure Servers are Configured The Same
    Automate Upgrades, Changes, & new Deployments
    

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33. INTRODUCING
    CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
    

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34. WHAT CAN CONFIGURATION
    MANAGEMENT DO?
    Manage Packages
    Manage Services
    Manage Configuration
    Manage Files
    Manage Users
    

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35. POPULAR TOOLS
    Puppet
    Chef
    CFEngine
    

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36. SO WHAT IS SALT?
    

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37. WHAT IS SALT
    SaltStack takes a new approach to infrastructure
    management by developing software that is easy enough to
    get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of
    thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with
    them in seconds. SaltStack delivers a dynamic infrastructure
    communication bus used for orchestration, remote execution,
    configuration management and much more.
    — About SaltStack, SaltStack.org
    “
    

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38. A DIFFERENT APPROACH
    Salt is a simple system that focuses on two things:
    Scalable, Fast Communication (Flow)
    Quickly get information / data from a server (State)
    

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39. SALT BASICS
    Minions connect to Master via ZeroMQ
    Minions authenticate with master via AES (pub/priv) keys
    Master can send module commands to minions to execute
    Execution is in parallel
    Modules are just python modules
    

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40. WHAT DOES THIS GIVE US?
    Extremely Scalable (~10k Minions per Server)
    Great Flexibility (just write a python module for new
    functionality)
    Simple, Avoids Complexity
    Great Building Blocks for Automation
    

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41. BUILT ON TOP OF SALT
    Configuration Management
    Remote Execution
    

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42. NEW / UPCOMING FUNCTIONALITY
    VM / Cloud Management
    Monitoring
    

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43. 100% OPEN SOURCE
    Everything is open source! Apache License
    No "watered-down" community edition
    8th Most Unique Contributors on GitHub in 2012
    Extremely Open & Friendly Community
    

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44. WHO USES SALT
    

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45. INSTALLING SALT
    ITS SO EASY EVEN I CAN DO IT
    

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46. BASIC SALT SETUP
    

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47. SETTING UP THE MASTER
    Install salt-master via Salt Bootstrap, Pip, Apt, Yum, Source,
    etc
    Edit Configuration (i.e. /etc/salt/master)
    File Roots
    Pillar Roots
    Restart salt-master (i.e. /etc/init.d/salt-master restart)
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49. SETTING UP THE MINIONS
    

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50. Install salt-minion via Salt Bootstrap, Pip, Apt, Yum, Source,
    etc
    Set FQDN on the server (OR set ID Manually in Config)
    Edit Configuration (i.e. /etc/salt/minion)
    Set Master Server
    Pillar Roots
    Restart Minion
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51. VIEW MINION KEYS
    On the salt master, list the current keys
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52. ACCEPT MINION KEYS
    Accept the key (view it before hand to make sure it's legit)
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53. THAT'S IT! WE'RE READY TO ROCK & ROLL.
    

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54. REMOTE EXECUTION
    "DO MY BIDING, MINIONS!"
    

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55. TARGETING MINIONS
    Use "salt" command on master to communicate to minions
    Example: Test Ping to All Minions
    u
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56. TARGETING TYPES OF MINIONS
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57. EXECUTE COMMAND ON SERVERS
    Example: Restart Apache
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58. EXECUTE MODULES ON SERVERS
    Example: Restart Apache
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59. LOTS OF MODULES
    Here are just some of them:
    apache, apt, cron, disk, file, mount, mysql, network, puppet,
    service, solr, state, test, useradd, win_disk, win_service,
    win_useradd
    

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60. CONFIGURATION
    MANAGEMENT
    KEEPING YOUR SERVERS CONFIGURED THE SAME
    

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61. OVERVIEW
    Define a State Tree
    Assign Parts of State Tree to Servers
    Minion will download it's state definition from the tree
    Minion will compare its current state vs state tree
    Minion will make changes to match state tree & report
    back
    

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62. WHAT IS STATE?
    Example using English:
    State Tree: Apache is installed & running
    Server Minion: Apache is not installed nor running
    

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63. TOP.SLS FILE
    Defines which servers have which parts of the state tree
    applied to them.
    Example top.sls file:
    b
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64. DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS
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65. TREE MAPS TO FILES
    Base is your file_roots
    apache2 => apache2/init.sls
    core => core/init.sls
    core.tools => core/tools.sls
    

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66. ANATOMY OF A STATE DECLARATION
    Example of a user definition
    j
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67. LETS INSTALL & MANAGE APACHE2
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68. JINJA TEMPLATES
    a
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69. APPLYING THE HIGH STATE
    You just call the state.highstate function
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70. View Slide

71. RANDOM TIPS FOR
    USING SALT
    COMMON PITFALLS WHILE GETTING STARTED WITH SALT
    

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72. DEBUGGING SALT
    Run things in the foreground:
    # R
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    a
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73. DEBUGGING SALT
    Run things manualy from the minion
    s
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74. OTHER TIDBITS
    yaml chokes on tabs, make sure you use spaces
    I use sublime text configured to always use spaces
    Use 127.0.1.1 in hosts file to set FQDN
    Test what is the FQDN with:
    p
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    e
    t
    ;
    p
    r
    i
    n
    t
    (
    s
    o
    c
    k
    e
    t
    .
    g
    e
    t
    f
    q
    d
    n
    (
    )
    )
    ;
    '
    

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75. YOU'VE BEEN INTRODUCED TO SALT
    NOW WHAT?
    

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76. CHECKOUT MY SALT AWS DEMO
    Uses Vagrant & AWS to setup a test 5 server environment.
    https://github.com/JustinCarmonyDotCom/salt-demo
    

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77. CHECKOUT SALT'S DOCUMENTATION &
    TUTORIALS
    Salt has some (and getting better all the
    time).
    very good docs
    

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78. JOIN THE SUPER FRIENDLY IRC CHANNEL
    irc.freenode.net #salt
    

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79. TRY IT OUT!
    Blog/tweet/discuss your experience
    

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80. IT'S OPEN SOURCE, GET INVOLVED
    Very Pull Request friendly
    (They even have accepted PR's from me!)
    

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