When using any sort of automation system for either remote execution or configuration management, one of the major advantages is the ability to reduce repetitive tasks. Often tasks in these scenarios involve using sensitive information such as passwords. In this talk we’ll look at how the SaltStack Pillar system can be used to store secrets and securely provide them to only the Salt minions that should have access to them. We'll look at how we can take advantage of external systems to store our Pillar data.

Using an automation system such as SaltStack is a great way to ensure that traditional servers and desktops are kept in a consistent state. Commonly run tasks such as software updates and system configuration can be done in a way that the results are always consistent. But what about network devices? Or devices where security restrictions prevent a Salt minion from running? The solution is the SaltStack Proxy minion system and Salt SSH.

Using an automation system such as SaltStack is a great way to ensure that traditional servers and desktops are kept in a consistent state. Commonly run tasks such as software updates and configurations can be done in a way that the results are always consistent. When using SaltStack this is accomplished using state files.

These state files are usually written using YAML, a human-readable data-serialization language, that presents the dictionaries and lists that SaltStack uses into a friendly format. Occasionally we need to go beyond the capabilities of what YAML can provide.

In this talk we'll explore some of the other ways that Salt states can be written, including using Jinja formatting and writing state files in programming languages such as Python.