In 2023, We're Adding More Salt to Our Diet

Author: Seth Cooper

As 2023 rang in, the gang at EITR decided to skip resolutions. How many of us have set ambitious goals only to abandon them by January 15th? It’s like trying to resist the temptation of holiday cookies—easy in theory but hard in execution.

This year, however, we’ll continue to uphold our core values and provide measurable value to our customers (and hopefully make rabid EITR fans of them in the process). We will focus on becoming more efficient and not getting trapped using ultra-specific tech on locked-in platforms. But most of all, we’re going to adopt the wisdom of others, listen, and use what others have done to make systems better, faster, more operational, scalable, and easily operated. We’re aware that this kind of sounds like a resolution. We promise you it’s not one. We simply decided to keep doing what we’ve been doing and just put a little more “oomph” into it.

But the big question is how? How do you just decide to get “better” at the day-to-day? Well, we go back to the words and ideas we used to get here. We share what we love about tools, technologies, and concepts with you… and Salt is one of those tools.

We use words like orchestration and terms like data-driven, remote execution, and configuration management to describe some of our core beliefs—not because they are trendy. Nuh-uh. Nay, we adhere to them and abide by them because they represent the backbone of how EITR Technologies likes to provide solutions.

And rather than bombard you with a giant bulleted list of why we love Salt, we’ll just tell you:

Salt is open-source (free as in free beer) software written in Python. It supports an incredibly wide range of operating systems, and we use it regularly and expertly in package management, service management, and cloud infrastructure management.

Salt is consistently improving thanks to industry-wide collaboration. That means the best of the best are contributing to the project over and over again. This creates a unique atmosphere where you can pull updates or fixes from the people and groups who have helped you before. And that is awesome because it simply is. It’s one of those things that is good for goodness’ sake. Like the smell of puppy breath or the taste of a hot dog when you’re at your favorite baseball stadium.

You can browse (and take) the updates of your favorite contributors, and learn more about what’s going on by reading the documentation that volunteers produce to make sure that you understand the content, so you can more easily build upon it or use it yourself.

During our time contributing to and benefiting from the Salt Project, we’ve met handfuls, dozens, and even scores, of the most generous, helpful, and friendliest folks on the Internet.

If that was the only thing we knew about Salt, it would probably be enough for us. But it’s not… there’s more. There’s the actual code, the updates, the fixes, the countless ways to enhance a project of your client’s or your own.

Salt is designed for high performance and great scalability and to be administered from a central location—like a laptop on a couch. Of course, high performance and scalability are popular buzzwords these days. But, they are also two of the cornerstone pillars of Salt (OMG – see what we did there? PILLARS?).

Need something designed to be highly scalable that can manage large numbers of servers and infrastructure? Salt is and Salt will! With its ability to manage the configuration of servers and applications, automate the deployment of new servers and applications, and integrate with other tools and systems, it’s a great choice for managing large-scale IT environments.

Have you had any bad experiences getting help from Commercial off-the-shelf “Solutions” that don’t solve your problem? Don’t worry, we know. It’s happened to us, too. But Salt has one of the world’s largest and most active communities. And that means that there is a wealth of resources and support available to help you get started and to help you finish.

Between blogs, forums, message boards, and repos, you’re never alone. It’s also widely used in companies of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. Salt has proven to be a powerful tool for automating and managing IT infrastructures. So chances are good that someone out there is using Salt the way you need to use it.

One of the key features of Salt is its remote execution engine, which allows you to execute commands and manage systems from a central location. This makes it easy to manage large-scale IT environments and eliminates the need for manually configuring each and every one of your servers. With the push-based architecture, you can send commands and configurations to multiple servers at once, making it easy to manage large-scale IT environments.

Want to trigger commands based on horrible (or awesome) conditions? Salt does it! Salt also includes a built-in event-based automation system that can trigger commands based on certain events or conditions. This allows for automated responses to changes in the environment and eliminates the need for manual intervention. This feature ensures consistency across your environment and eliminates the need for manual configuration, allowing you to focus on more important tasks.

Salt uses simple, human-readable syntax so that it’s intuitive and easy to learn. I know what you’re thinking (because I asked a non-developer to look at one of the Salt updates), and I’ll be real with you: he couldn’t use it to develop anything, but he did understand what he was looking at and reading by the end of the night. This kind of purposeful simplicity makes Salt accessible to a wide range of users, from IT professionals to system administrators to the technical writers who need to write to it and about it.

Come to think of it, here at EITR Technologies, we’re a lot like the Salt Project ourselves (excuse our shameless plug). We solve hard problems without over-promising. We’re easy to work with, strive for simplicity, and we aim to be relentlessly helpful as much as we can.

Next to lastly, Salt can be deployed in various ways such as agentless, push model, masterless, and pull model. The agentless deployment uses SSH as a transport and is a great way to configure systems without installing long-running software on systems. In a push model initiated from the server, systems are configured ad-hoc to allow for local drift (for better or worse). “Masterless” deployments are great for a distributed setup without a centralized server, and a pull model will allow minions “ask” for their configurations on an interval (or via triggered events) from the main server. This flexibility allows users to choose the deployment method that best suits their environment.

We’ll let you go now but remember: The Salt Project is powerful open-source software that allows you to manage your IT environment in a centralized and automated way. Its flexibility in deployment options, built-in event-based automation system, simple and human-readable syntax, and scalability make it an ideal solution for managing large-scale IT environments. With its active community and wide range of resources and support, it’s easy to start reaping the benefits of automation and management in your IT infrastructure.

Seth Cooper is a Technical Writer, Teacher, Builder of People and Teams, and Tinkerer. He’s spent close to 30 years trying to remove roadblocks and put out fires, so that other people can work smarter… not harder. Whether spending time changing the color of a header, rewriting a 300-page, six-year-out-of-date user manual, or creating hundreds of pages of new documentation for an application which isn’t complete yet, Seth has one goal in mind; creating a document that makes the users’ job easier to complete. After spending ten years in direct mail, writing commercials, and helping produce spam… He has spent the last 15 years trying to keep America and her allies safe. In his spare time, he is a Father, a Husband, a Lego-Guy, a gamer, and a lover of reptiles and aquariums.