Hall - Mastering SaltStack : take charge of SaltStack to automate and configure enterprise-grade environments

Joseph Hall has touched just about every area of the modern technology world from his beginnings as a support technician to being a web programmer, QA engineer, systems administrator, Linux instructor, and cloud engineer. He is currently a senior cloud and integrations engineer at SaltStack. Joseph enjoys working with some of the best minds in the business with his coworkers and SaltStack's partners. He is also a classically trained chef. Joseph's supreme pleasure lies in working with what he calls computational gastronomy.

I would like to thank my wife, Nat, for her support when I stayed up every night to write this book. I would also like to thank Tom Hatch for writing Salt and having the guts to turn it into the best company that I've ever worked for. My sincere thanks go out to Colton Meyers for hooking me up with Packt Publishing. I would also like to thank the Salt community for being awesome and helping make Salt what it is today.

Pedro Algarvio was a Sound Technician until May 2015. He likes to keep himself busy. Therefore, Pedro set out to make computers work for him. In his endeavor to deepen his knowledge of computers, he started with shell scripting and then moved on to learn Perl, and finally settled with Python. Pedro was involved with several open source projects. However, he credits Salt for giving him the opportunity to learn the most. He joined SaltStack in May 2015 and dedicated his time to improve the Salt software.

I would like to thank my wife for her continuous friendship, love, and support throughout. She even supported me when I took the risk of quitting my job to to pursue a skill, in which I had no experience. I would also like to thank my twins for allowing me some spare time to review Joseph's book. Further, I want to thank the Salt community for teaching me new things everyday. Last but not least, I would like to thank God.

I love learning new things. SaltStack gave the opportunity to learn more about Salt, which made me grow as a Python coder and enthusiast. I would like to thank SaltStack for their continuous belief and encouragement to the point of inviting me to join the team.

Darrel Clute is an IT infrastructure architect. Throughout his career, he has predominately focused on network engineering. Darrel has also spent an equal amount of time focusing on systems engineering, primarily with Unix-based systems. Apart from his job, he is also an advocate of the open source software. This is used in enterprise as well as for individuals. Darrel will never advocate the use of open source purely for the sake of it.

Outside his core competencies, he also has extensive experience with proprietary and open source virtualization platforms. His knowledge and experience with IaaS solutionssuch as OpenStackis constantly increasing as well. Additionally, with his systems engineering experience, Darrel has been exposed to and has supported various web and enterprise applications. His most recent exposure has been to PaaS solutions. This has led him to advocate that a public or private cloud offering is not complete without coupling IaaS and PaaS solutions designed and deployed in lockstep.

Beyond his core infrastructure, Darrel has recently been developing programing skills to augment his daily activities. Throughout his career, he has utilized various languages and utilities to automate infrastructure. Some of Darrel's programming has been with the use of Bash, net-snmp, sed, awk, and holistically Python.

JiWei Liu graduated in 2011. He is employed as a cloud computing and operation and maintenance engineer at Gamewave Group Limited (PRC), China's largest web game provider. It is also the leader of the Chinese web game industry and the professional provider of interactive entertainment services.

I would like to thank my sweetheart for her help and support in the process of writing this book.

Hong nh Qun is a junior system administrator and network infrastructure engineer. He has extensive experience in designing, deploying, hardening, and maintaining Linux systems and the network infrastructure for small-and medium-sized companies.

Peng Yao is an operations engineer with more than 8 years of experience in infrastructure automation, data visualization, and cloud computing. He is the founder and coordinator of the China SaltStack user group.