About This Book Automate tasks effectively, so that your infrastructure can run itself Take advantage of cloud-based services that can expand the capabilities of your own data centers Tackle real-world problems that appear in everyday situations Who This Book Is For This book is ideal for professionals who have been managing groups of servers, and want to learn how to expand their toolset. This book will also explain some of the more advanced features of Salt, and explore how to use them to bring additional power to the fundamentals that the professionals have already been using. What You Will Learn Learn how the pros are managing their infrastructures, and what techniques they use to keep everything running smoothly with Salt Understand what makes Salt tick, and how that affects the way you use it Take a look at familiar features in a new light, so that you have a better handle on how to approach tasks Use Salt SSH to manage the servers that don't fit Salt's traditional use cases Besides automating your configuration, you will be able to automate your servers, and make them behave more intelligently Make better use of cloud-based services, including compute clouds such as EC2, Azure, and OpenStack Learn about the new RAET protocol, and how it changes the way automation works In Detail This book will help you bring forward capabilities that will help you excel in the management of your servers. You will be taken through the mind of the modern systems engineer, and discover how they use Salt to manage their infrastructures. The inner workings of Salt will be explored, so that as you advance your knowledge of Salt, you will be able to swim with the current, rather than against it. Various subsystems of Salt such as Salt SSH, Salt Cloud, and job caches are explained in detail. You will be taken through an in-depth discussion about how to effectively scale Salt to manage thousands of machines, and how to troubleshoot issues. You will also be taken through an overview of RAET, Salt's new transport protocol, and given an insight into how this technology improves Salt.