Salt is a python based infrastructure management tool. With it you can use a master to control a bunch of minions. One feature I like is the ability to spin up servers in the cloud. To start with you’ll need salt and salt-cloud installed. On your master you have to create a file with all your image profiles in /etc/salt/cloud.profiles, mine looks like:

ubuntu_12_04_512:
    provider: openstack
    size: 512MB Standard Instance
    image: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

ubuntu_11_04_512:
    provider: openstack
    size: 512MB Standard Instance
    image: Ubuntu 11.04

Here are my provider settings I use to spin up a server on Rackspace CloudServers (/etc/salt/cloud):

minion:
    master: myhost.mydomain.com

provider: rackspace

OPENSTACK.identity_url: 'https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/tokens'
OPENSTACK.compute_name: cloudServersOpenStack
OPENSTACK.compute_region: region
OPENSTACK.tenant: tenant_id
OPENSTACK.user: userid
OPENSTACK.apikey: yourkey
OPENSTACK.protocol: ipv4

log_file: /var/log/salt/cloud

This will create a CloudServer:

salt-cloud -p openstack_512 testweb1

That’s it! To destroy it:

salt-cloud -d testweb1

Salt uses States to control how you interact with the minions. I can have Apache and MySQL installed with a few configurations. Salt uses yaml syntax for the configuration files. Usually they are stored in /srv/salt/ and the base file is called top.sls. My top.sls looks like:

base:
  testweb1:
    - www.apache
    - db.mysql

the testweb1 part tells which host to run the next states on. each state is in a list below the host. I have two listed, one is to get apache setup and one is to get mysql setup. Salt knows where to look, the dotted structure is for directories and files. In the www directory, I’ve got an apache.sls file which has the settings for setting up apache. That looks like (/srv/salt/www/apache.sls):

apache2:
  pkg:
    - installed
  service:
    - running

php5:
  pkg:
    - installed

When this runs, it tells the package management system on the installed OS to install Apache2 and PHP5. Pretty sweet. The MySQL part looks like (/srv/salt/db/mysql.sls):

mysql-server:
  pkg:
    - installed
  service:
    - running

now you should have mysql and apache with php up and running.