Automated Cloud Provisioning with Salt Cloud

Speaker:Christer Edwards
Date:2013-02-23

What is it?

  • Disclaimer: THIS IS BETA!
  • Public cloud provisioning tool
  • Integrate into cloud providers cleanly, quickly, easily
  • Manage via maps and profiles
  • Pre-installs Salt, but doesn’t have to be used
  • Meant to be a generic cloud mgmt thingy

Configuration

  • Configs are yaml
  • Specify provider settings here, too.
  • Multiple providers works too

/etc/salt/cloud:

minion:
    master: salt.domain.tld

Profiles

  • Designate VMs inside profile config

/etc/salt/cloud.profiles:

centos_linode:
    provider: linode
    image: CentoOS 6.2 64bit
    size: Linode 512
    minion:
        master.salt.domain.tld
    grains:
        role: webserver
  • Define Salt master and custom grains
  • Allows you to assing roles, or different masters per providers
    • See: Salt syndics
    • Syndics are tiered masters (master -> sub-masters -> minions)
    • e.g. one syndic master per cloud provider
    • Controlled by master-master

Maps

  • Specify a prfile and then machines to make from it

  • Example:

    fedora_high:
    - redis1
    - redis2
    - redis3
centos_high:
    - mysql1
    - mysql2
    - mysql3

Then run it:

salt-cloud -m /path/to/map.file -P
  • -P = parallel exec
  • Map files can also include grains!

Bootstrapping Salt

  • Supports a few ways for strapping Salt onto new machines

  • script: (<0.8.4) config setting:

    fedora_linode:
    ...
    script: Fedora

  • salt-bootstrap (>=0.8.4) utility

  • src:saltcloud/deploy has distro-specific insall scripts (e.g. Fedora.sh)

  • >=0.8.4 if you omit script:, salt-bootstrap is used

  • Update manually:

    salt-cloud [-u|--update-boostrap]

No Deployment

  • You can provision without deploying Salt
  • deploy: False or script: None in profile
  • CLI: salt-cloud --no-deploy -p <profile> <instance>

What’s coming?

  • Salt 0.14.0 will include salt-virt
  • KVM support (libvirt)
  • salt.run virt.query
  • salt.run virt.init $name $cpu $ram $image
  • Serve images from salt://, http://, ftp://