Configuration Management with SaltStack - Extended Training Course

Architecture, State Routing & Access Control

• Introduction to SaltStack Architecture: High-availability Master/Minion design, Syndic hierarchies, multi-Master redundancy, and event bus fundamentals
• State Management & Routing: top.sls mapping, Pillar vs. Grains, conditional state execution, SLS inheritance, and environment branching (dev/stage/prod)
• Role and Rights Management within SaltStack: Key management (RSA/Ed25519), ACLs, SLS encryption, LDAP/AD integration, sudo-less execution patterns, and privilege escalation controls
• Lab 1: Provisioning a multi-Master Salt environment, configuring minion authentication, and building role-based state routing with encrypted Pillar data

Event-Driven Automation & Extensibility

• Deepening Knowledge on the Reactor Concept: Reactor.sls architecture, event matching patterns, real-time auto-remediation workflows, and state-triggered automation
• Orchestration & Workflow Management: salt-run, orchestrate.sls, cross-node task chaining, dependency resolution, and GitOps handoff patterns
• Creation of Custom Modules, Runners and Returner: Writing custom Python modules/runners, developing output/returner plugins, Jinja/Salt templating best practices, packaging & distributing reusable formulas
• Lab 2: Building a reactor-driven auto-provisioning workflow, creating custom runners for service discovery, and implementing a mock returner to a centralized metrics endpoint

Troubleshooting, Monitoring & Enterprise Scaling

• Troubleshooting Salt Workflows: Debug modes (salt -l debug), state execution failure analysis, network/firewall considerations, minion recovery, and high-load state compilation issues
• Job Management (Monitoring): Job cache architecture, queue management, saltutil commands, orchestration monitoring, and integration with Prometheus/Grafana or ELK stacks
• Performance Tuning: Master/minion tuning (multiprocessing, cache sizing), file server optimization (gitfs/s3fs/glusterfs), state compilation caching, and scaling strategies for 10k+ nodes
• Capstone: End-to-end automation workflow: architecture → states → reactor → monitoring → tuning → documentation & operational runbook creation
• Open Q&A, certification prep guidance (SaltStack/SALT University), and resource distribution