Summary

Salt is made possible by the existence of the loader system, which detects which modules are able to load, and then only what is available. Types of module that make use of the lazy loader will only be loaded on demand.

Python is an integral part of Salt, allowing modules to be easily written and maintained. Salt ships with a library of functions that help support the loader system, and the modules that are loaded with it. These files live in various directories under the salt/ directory in Salt's code base. For example, execution modules live in salt/modules/.

This chapter barely brushed the surface of what is possible with Salt, but it got some necessary concepts out of the way. From here on in, the focus will be all about writing and maintaining modules in Python.