A few weeks back I wrote an article Getting started with SaltStack; that article covered Configuration and Package Automation with Saltstack. In Today's article I am going to cover SaltStack's Remote Execution abilities, a feature that I feel Saltstack has implemented better than other automation tools.
Running a command in a State If you remember from the previous article SaltStack's states are permanent configurations. Adding a command in a Salt state is used when you want to have a command that is run after provisioning a server, run every time Salt manages the state of the system or run when certain conditions are true....
Systems Administration is changing, with the huge scale of internet company deployments and the popularity of cloud computing. Server deployments are often scaling faster than the systems administration teams supporting them. In order to meet the demand those teams are finding themselves changing the ways they have traditionally managed servers.
One of those changes is automation, where once a sysadmin would need to spend time installing packages by hand (via apt or yum) and modifying configuration files....
I'm going to start this post by saying what I'm really thinking. 90% of the time if an application is running as the root user on a Unix/Linux machine; it is because the sysadmin who setup or designed the environment was being lazy.
Now before getting offended, being a lazy sysadmin is a good thing. The fact is that most systems administrators are lazy in some way, and that is the reason why most systems administration tasks end up being scripted....