Andrew Mallett - Automating Your Enterprise and Your Network

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.

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For many years, we have seen the importance of being able to manage your servers and desktops. Configuration management systems are abounding in this arena with so many to choose from. For enterprises that need to automate the configuration of their varied network devices, the options have been few and far between.

The SaltStack project from Utah in the United States has created not only a world-beating configuration management suite with Salt, but has included the Salt Proxy subsystem that can allow your network devices to be upgraded to first-class citizens in the world of configuration management. Not wanting to be held back by outdated thought processes, SaltStack continued their growth into the cloud, and the free open source tools include Salt Cloud to manage the virtual machine instances, both in the public and private clouds. We now have one tool, Salt, to manage your Windows and Linux servers. Matching this, we have the single tool, Salt Proxy, to manage your network devices independent of their vendor and the single Salt Cloud tool to manage public and private clouds independent of the hypervisor. If your enterprise needs vendor-agnostic tools to manage the entire infrastructure, then SaltStack is very much your only answer.

In this book, we take you through the SaltStack suite using different Linux distributions allowing to experience it in a true multi-vendor playing field. Starting with configuration management with Salt, we implement the server-client architecture to manage your server and desktop systems, moving quickly forward into an agentless environment using Salt SSH. You are not limited with the possibilities presented by the Utah-based team. It is your choice to use agents or not. As the number of systems managed by Salt increases, we show how, using Salt Syndic, you can manage remote sites and load-balance connections to the main server. The book closes by showing how, using Salt and Salt Proxy, your network devices can have the same status as your servers, being managed as easily as everything else with the same agnostic approach.

By the time you reach the end of this book, you will have received information on the most important elements of SaltStack, being able to write your own Salt State (SLS) files in YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language), Jinja, and raw Python. You will be able to set up true orchestration using reactors and beacons, ensuring that the system you have built becomes self-healing. You will have learned to use Salt SSH to connect to remote systems and even use it to deploy the Salt Minion on your device without ever needing to leave your main console. Culminating in managing Arista routers, you will have become the consummate professional with your entire estate managed using the Salt Open suite.