Foreword

Regardless of your current experience with Salt, you will find this book a necessary addition to unlock the full potential and capabilities of Salt to manage your infrastructure. Salt has a very flexible and modular architecture, and you will no doubt get very far down the path of fully automating your environment with the out-of-the-box Salt setup. However, we all have those custom unique quirks to our environments, or legacy systems, which require special treatment. Extending SaltStack will arm you with all of the information you need to get the most out of Salt to manage those hard-to-reach places of your environment to obtain full automation.

As the author of one of Salt's cloud modules, I can only say that I am envious of your position! I wish that this book had been available to provide the basics of module development when I was getting started. You'll find this book does a great job of covering all the basics of extending Salt, whereas also providing the detailed depth to really understand how your modules plug in with the rest of Salt.

Joseph Hall was the first engineer working at SaltStack apart from the Founder, Thomas Hatch. He has worked on all components of Salt and built much of the foundation that makes the tool so easy to extend. I have positive feelings that you'll find this book concise, easy to follow, and an outstanding resource to learn how to take full advantage of Salt. Go forth and automate!

Eric Johnson

Author of SaltStack's Google Compute Engine cloud module