Modern-day data centers face an enormous amount of complexity, from managing and deploying distributed applications to monitoring and controlling changes in networking hardware, engineers face an unprecedented set of challenges in trying to tame the chaos. In this talk, Mike Place from SaltStack will cover how to use Salt to automate and control all the elements of a modern data center, from the physical hardware to the application packaging and deployment. He’ll also show how automation frameworks can merge with monitoring systems to create event-driven infrastructure patterns that can achieve maximum observability and quick remediation to every type of deployment.

1. Systems Automation
© 2018 SALTSTACKMike Place — SaltStack Principal Maintainer

2. 2
Who am I and why would you care?
Mike Place — Salt Maintainer
I manage the SaltStack project and I
travel the world, getting into spirited
conversations about how to manage
systems.

3. 3
What is Salt anyhow?
Salt is an event-driven continuous automation engine

4. A massive community
Salt Open Source Project
• Salt OSS created in Feb. 2011
• Loosely coupled, powerful system management tools
• Pervasive adoption
• Tech powered by Salt incl: Kubernetes, Nutanix, IBM,
Cloudflare, EMC, Cisco & dozens more
• Mostly used for complex, Web-scale automation
• 37:1 commit to contributor ratio
• Sticky technology and friendly community
SUSE collaboration
• SUSE Manager
• Ceph
• Docker
• JEOS
Current Contributors (Open Hub)
Salt 720
Docker 590
Puppet 150
1900+ All-time Contributors
4M+ Annual Downloads
69,000+ Commits

5. Master & minions

6. 6
Salt is more than config management
● Salt is a systems management platform
● Salt is a foundation for complex management
● Salt has a lot going on...
● Salt can be broken down to four macro components...

7. 7
SaltStack Automation and Orchestration
Intelligent - Scalable - Flexible
Remote Execution

8. Remote Execution
Minion Requests Connection
Master Accepts Communication
Persistent, Asynchronous,
Connection

9. Salt Architecture
Master
Pillar
Reactor
Mine
Minion
Grains
Beacon
Modules
Salt * module.function arguments
TARGET INSTRUCTION SET
ØMQ
MESSAGE
BUS

10. 10
SaltStack Automation and Orchestration
Intelligent - Scalable - Flexible
Configuration Management

11. Configuration Management

12. 12
SaltStack Automation and Orchestration
Intelligent - Scalable - Flexible
Event System

13. Unique event-driven automation
Authentication events
Start events
Cloud events
File system changes
Network and disk usage
System load
Key events
Shell activity
Service status
Job events
System Events &
Data
DevOps orchestration
Security remediation
File system changes
Processor load
Memory usage
Reactor Commands
Auto-scale infra
Configuration drift
Service status
Disk usage
Event Reactor
(Master)
Infrastructure Nodes
(Minions)
Servers
IoTWindows
Virtual Machines
Containers
Public Cloud
Storage
Hyper-Converged
Networking
Private Cloud

14. 14
SaltStack: Cloud Management
Intelligent - Scalable - Flexible

15. 15
SaltStack Automation and Orchestration
Intelligent - Scalable - Flexible
Remote Execution
Configuration Management
Cloud Management
Event System

16. 16
Demo Time

17. THANK YOU
© 2016 SALTSTACK
801.207.7440
www.saltstack.com
3400 N. Ashton Blvd. Suite 110
Lehi, UT 84043
@SaltStack