Infrastructure as code-with saltstack
Ever wondered why the term "Lazy System Admin came into play"? simple answer is ,for you to be lazy then you have to be smart.
Enter SaltStack - A remote execution and Configuration management tool. Humans have an innate desire to be lazy and surprisingly its a good thing if you are a systems admin or systems engineer.
What is a configuration management and remote execution tool you may ask ? read this http://www.pythian.com/blog/using-saltstack-for-configuration-management/ .I have been reading a lot about puppet ,chef ,cfengine ,saltstack and all the other configuration managers for the past 4 months. With all the wars going on about which one is the best , i settled for salt .I tried puppet once ,installed it and it was a nightmare for me getting it to work and i have already forgotten why i wanted to use it in the first place.Don't get me wrong though ,puppet is still the most popular among many people ,primarily ruby developers because it uses some DSL which most people claim is flexible.
Since this is about salt ,i am going to leave puppet for now , you see i am a php guy and recently i have been teaching myself python , not yet there but the syntax is basically the same with many programming languages.I was totally sold by salt when i figured it was written in python and it was my chance to really get to understand python (though you wont need python experience to get started with salt)
Sifting through all the material about configuration management ,i liked what it came to do and i am finding it easier to do it in salt.Salt itself has a vast of terms that one needs to understand and i have to admit ,i have just scratched the surface.At the moment i am able to do basic things in my 28 minions.
- Restarting them
- checking how long they have been running.
- Installing software
- Configuring that software based upon your own specific needs
- Adding users and configuring permissions for them.
that's just the surface and i liked how i can do all of these things on one server (saltmaster). For the next 3 months ,my head will be on forums and blogs, trying to understand what else i can do with saltstack because i have been promised more and i know there is more. I have also managed to install saltpad,a web GUI for saltstack and figured ,let me keep it there for now and will use it once i understand how salt-stack works from the command line
My example top file
[root@lockdown ~]# cat /srv/salt/top.sls
base:
'*':
- vim-enhanced
'casper*':
- git
- webserver
'lorax*':
- bind
- webserver
[root@lockdown ~]#
How to get started
Use the installation manual on the main salt website,its good as it is, you wont need anything more. Like you and me ,i m still getting my feet wet and hopefully in 3 months time ,will come around with another article explaining all the complex staff that i would have achieved with salt.
For now ,happy reading