• <1 minute

Azure Virtual Machines, now with “Salt”

In this post, we will give an overview of setting up a SaltStack managed environment in Azure.

Earlier this month, Azure and Salt stack demonstrated Salt in action on Azure  at SaltConf 2015.  Now as a next step, the Salt team has released a single click solution for deploying SaltStack Enterprise on Azure from the Azure Marketplace. SaltStack is a configuration management system that can work on any cloud environment to manage and maintain remote nodes in defined states by performing remote execution and data querying tasks. For a detailed overview of SaltStack capabilities please visit the walkthrough guide here.

With this integration, Azure Marketplace now provides a certified image for deploying SaltStack server on Azure in minutes using your existing SaltStack license. To get started with managing your enterprise application with Salt, acquire a license by contacting Saltstack.

Note : For dev/test scenarios you can use the free Salt master image in VM Depot.  For the Marketplace scenario once licensed, select the CentOS 6.5 w/ SaltStack Enterprise image in the Azure Marketplace.

 

SaltEnterprise

 

Once the Salt Server VM is created and accessible, go ahead and log into the VM using ssh. The SaltStack Master service should be running and accepting connections to SaltStack Minions.

In order to add new VMs and accept them as Minions managed by the SaltStack Master, it is often easiest to use Salt Cloud, which can automate the process. For convenience, Salt Cloud is already installed on the SaltStack Enterprise image. Information on configuring Salt Cloud for use with the Azure to provision VMs with Salt Minions can be found here.

Azure provides a stable platform for SaltStack Enterprise Master and a number of SaltStack Minions, while still supporting interoperability between public and private clouds.

Hope you find this integration useful, we look forward to hearing from you!