Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Plunging into the state compiler

Salt was initially designed as a remote execution system to be used for gathering data normally collected by monitoring systems and storing it for later analysis. However, as functionality grew, so too did a need to manage the execution modules that were doing the heavy lifting. Salt states were born from this need and, before long, the engine that managed them had expanded into other areas of Salt.

Imperative versus declarative

A point of contention between various configuration management systems is the concept of declarative versus imperative configurations. Before we discuss Salt's take on the matter, let's take a moment to examine the two.

It may be easiest to think of imperative programming like a script: perform ...