What this book covers

Chapter 1, Reviewing a Few Essentials, talks about how to review a few fundamental concepts to get into the right frame of mind. While many of the concepts should be familiar to the experienced user, you are likely to find plenty of new information as well.

Chapter 2, Diving into Salt Internals, jumps into the deeper workings behind Salt. It discusses the internal configuration, the loader system, renderers, and the state compiler.

Chapter 3, Exploring Salt SSH, explores how Salt SSH is a powerful tool. It's been getting a lot of love from the core developers lately. This is possibly the most complete discussion of Salt SSH.

Chapter 4, Managing Tasks Asynchronously, discusses how one of the most important concepts behind Salt is asynchronicity. This chapter lays down the fundamentals that will be referenced throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 5, Taking Salt Cloud to the Next Level, goes deeper, exposing parts of Salt Cloud, which turn casual users into experts. No matter how much you've used Salt Cloud, there's a good chance you've only scratched the surface.

Chapter 6, Using Salt with REST, talks about how it's almost impossible to work with technology these days without depending on REST services. It uses Salt to tie these services to your infrastructure with ease.

Chapter 7, Understanding the RAET Protocol, teaches you the concepts behind RAET and how they impact upon you. RAET is still new, but it's already found its way into large organizations.

Chapter 8, Strategies for Scaling, talks about how to never assume that your infrastructure will stay small. It makes you think about how to scale your infrastructure properly before it's too late.

Chapter 9, Monitoring with Salt, discovers how Salt is a powerful monitoring tool if you know how to use it. It tells you how to integrate it with existing tools or use Salt alone.

Chapter 10, Exploring Best Practices, discusses the good and bad ways to use any tool. It teaches you the good ways to use Salt.

Chapter 11, Troubleshooting Problems, tells you where to look and how to find help when things go wrong.