Hello, and welcome to this Pluralsight presentation!
My name is Andrew Mallett,
and I'm here as your instructor to help guide you through
the module where we take a look at implementing SaltStack
for configuration management.
Now, this is just one of many of the tools that we've been
looking at, but we're going to be understanding a little bit
more about Salt and SaltStack.
The project is the SaltStack project.
It's currently owned by VMware, they took ownership in October 2020, and in
their commercial version, it's called vRealize SaltStack Config.
We also have the project version, which is Salt Open. Much in the same
way as Puppet, it's server and client‑based. On the server, we would
need to open up TCP ports 4505 and 4506.
It's very scalable, though, as all of the work is done by the client.
It's Python‑based, and we use YAML state files where we want to persist
our configuration. And for Salt state files, we use the .sls suffix.
Now, when we take a look at installing Salt, out of the standard
distributions that CompTIA recommend for the Linux+ course, so we're
we're looking at Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Red Hat‑based, it's openSUSE that
does ship with Salt.
Ubuntu 20.04, which we are using, doesn't ship with Salt, but the latest
version, 22.04, does ship with Salt, and I would suggest there's been an
agreement between VMware and Canonical on that. But we'll be using our
openSUSE 15.2 system for this module. Now, although we've already said that
Salt is a client‑server based, just like Puppet, it can be used in a
standalone format. When we're using Salt in a server‑client environment,
the command salt is used on the Salt‑Master to publish jobs to our Salt
minions.
Whereas where we're working in a standalone environment,
salt‑call ‑‑local can be used on our minion to apply state files.
As I say, though,
we're going to be working on openSUSE 15.2, and we're going to be diving
out to our command line to run the installation soon.
We're going to be installing from the standard SUSE repositories, and one
reason why it might explain that SUSE have it within their repositories and
maybe others don't is because SaltStack and Novell are both based in Utah,
and at one stage, Novell owned SUSE. We can go ahead and install the Salt
minion. Once we've got it installed,
we're able to check its version, but we're also able to run commands
directly from the command line, much in the same way as Puppet and
in our Ansible, as we've already seen.
So test.ping is going to get a response coming back from our agent, but we
can also go through into a test.versions. With this, we not only get the
version of Salt coming back, but of the dependencies.
Now, as always,
the best way to really understand this is from the command line, so I
encourage you that you join me on your openSUSE 15.2 system so that we're able to understand this just a little bit better.