In the first few sessions of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course we used Ansible as the tool-of-choice because it’s the easiest automation tool to get started with. Now that we’ve established the baseline, it’s time to explore the alternatives.

In a live session on February 27th 2018, Mircea Ulinic will describe Salt, an open source, general-purpose event-driven automation framework that we briefly discussed in Episode 77 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

In case you’re wondering why I decided to include Salt in the course: it’s used by very large companies around the globe (including CloudFlare where Mircea works) for various operations including cloud provisioning, bringing systems up to a desired configuration, schedule commands, securely transfer files, or coordinate complex multi-systems orchestrations.

In his presentation, Mircea will describe how to get started with Salt and set up an environment for event-driven network automation and orchestration.

Salt cross-platform capabilities are implemented with NAPALM, which we will assume you're already familiar with (it’s covered in details in various self-study sections of the course). We will learn how to install Salt, go through a brief introduction to its CLI syntax, and get to know the advanced configuration management capabilities.

Debugging is always very important - particularly during development, so we will cover this as well, and explore the features Salt provides for debugging.

In the end, we will be briefly discussing event-driven infrastructure that we can use to trigger fully automatic configuration changes in response to external or internal network events.

Interested? Register now!