Get a complete introduction to Salt the widely used Python-based configuration management & remote execution tool This practical guide not only shows system administrators how to manage complex infrastructures with Salt but also teaches developers how to use Salt to deploy & manage their applications Written by two Salt experts this book provides the information you need to deploy Salt in a production infrastructure right away You'll also learn how to customize Salt & use salt-cloud to manage your virtualization If you have experience with Linux & data formats such as JSON or XML you're ready to get started Understand what Salt can do & get a high-level overview of basic commands Learn how execution modules let you interact with many systems at once Use states to define how you want a host or a set of hosts to look Dive into grains & pillars Salt's basic data elements Control your infrastructure programmatically by extending Salt Master's functionality Extend Salt with custom modules the Jinja templating language & Python scripts