SaltStack - Overview

What is SaltStack?

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 runs on Linux by default, but any operating system can be a minion, and currently Windows, VMware vSphere and BSD Unix variants are well supported. 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 also offers Salt SSH, which provides an “agent less” systems management.

Need for SaltStack

SaltStack is built for speed and scale. This is why it is used to manage large infrastructures with tens of thousands of servers at LinkedIn, WikiMedia and Google.

Imagine that you have multiple servers and want to do things to those servers. You would need to login to each one and do those things one at a time on each one and then you might want to do complicated things like installing software and then configuring that software based on some specific criteria.

Let us assume you have ten or maybe even 100 servers. Imagine logging in one at a time to each server individually, issuing the same commands on those 100 machines and then editing the configuration files on all 100 machines becomes very tedious task. To overcome those issues, you would love to update all your servers at once, just by typing one single command. SaltStack provides you exactly the solution for all such problems.

Features of SaltStack

SaltStack is an open-source configuration management software and remote execution engine. Salt is a command-line tool. While written in Python, SaltStack configuration management is language agnostic and simple. Salt platform uses the push model for executing commands via the SSH protocol. The default configuration system is YAML and Jinja templates. Salt is primarily competing with Puppet, Chef and Ansible.

Salt provides many features when compared to other competing tools. Some of these important features are listed below.

Fault tolerance − Salt minions can connect to multiple masters at one time by configuring the master configuration parameter as a YAML list of all the available masters. Any master can direct commands to the Salt infrastructure.
Flexible − The entire management approach of Salt is very flexible. It can be implemented to follow the most popular systems management models such as Agent and Server, Agent-only, Server-only or all of the above in the same environment.
Scalable Configuration Management − SaltStack is designed to handle ten thousand minions per master.
Parallel Execution model − Salt can enable commands to execute remote systems in a parallel manner.
Python API − Salt provides a simple programming interface and it was designed to be modular and easily extensible, to make it easy to mold to diverse applications.
Easy to Setup − Salt is easy to setup and provides a single remote execution architecture that can manage the diverse requirements of any number of servers.
Language Agnostic − Salt state configuration files, templating engine or file type supports any type of language.

Benefits of SaltStack

Being simple as well as a feature-rich system, Salt provides many benefits and they can be summarized as below −

Robust − Salt is powerful and robust configuration management framework and works around tens of thousands of systems.
Authentication − Salt manages simple SSH key pairs for authentication.
Secure − Salt manages secure data using an encrypted protocol.
Fast − Salt is very fast, lightweight communication bus to provide the foundation for a remote execution engine.
Virtual Machine Automation − The Salt Virt Cloud Controller capability is used for automation.
Infrastructure as data, not code − Salt provides a simple deployment, model driven configuration management and command execution framework.

Introduction to ZeroMQ

Salt is based on the ZeroMQ library and it is an embeddable networking library. It is lightweight and a fast messaging library. The basic implementation is in C/C++ and native implementations for several languages including Java and .Net is available.

ZeroMQ is a broker-less peer-peer message processing. ZeroMQ allows you to design a complex communication system easily.

ZeroMQ comes with the following five basic patterns −

Synchronous Request/Response − Used for sending a request and receiving subsequent replies for each one sent.
Asynchronous Request/Response − Requestor initiates the conversation by sending a Request message and waits for a Response message. Provider waits for the incoming Request messages and replies with the Response messages.
Publish/Subscribe − Used for distributing data from a single process (e.g. publisher) to multiple recipients (e.g. subscribers).
Push/Pull − Used for distributing data to connected nodes.
Exclusive Pair − Used for connecting two peers together, forming a pair.

ZeroMQ is a highly flexible networking tool for exchanging messages among clusters, cloud and other multi system environments. ZeroMQ is the default transport library presented in SaltStack.

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