Agenda

Agenda information is subject to change. All times are Mountain Time.

All Tracks

SaltConf21 Keynote

Track 1

Wayne Werner

Senior Member, Salt Core Team

Surprising Links Between Gardening and Software.

When doing some yard work, I learned a surprising lesson about writing and maintaining software.

Track 2

Tom Hatch

Founder of Salt Project

Open Source in the Enterprise

Learn how open source can be monetized and supported in modern enterprises. Why open source is so critical and companies should view it in order to win.

Track 3

Gary Giesen

Director, Network Services, EGATE Networks

Network Automation with Deltaproxy and Native Minions

An introduction to the new network minion types in Salt Silicon and how they can be used to increase the scale of your Salt network automation deployment while reducing resource requirements.

Track 1

Tyler Johnson

Software Engineer, VMware

Agentless multi-cloud deployments using IDEM

Idem is a language runtime that is excels at agentless multi-cloud management. Idem solves 3 major problems with cloud management.

  1. idempotent management of resources across clouds and accounts
  2. Complete governance over IT services
  3. Scalability

We will discuss how to use idem to solve these problems from within the salt ecosystem. This includes encrypting credentials, integrating plugins, writing multi-cloud states, and writing multi-credentialed interdependent single cloud states.

Track 2

Cleber Paiva de Souza and Lucas Sanches

Director and Lead Software Engineer, SSYS Sistemas

Adding workflow approval to Salt

In many corporate environments is crucial that you request formal approval for execution of actions in computer systems. Actions could be anything from a simple reboot to the installation of packages, enable/disable of services among others. On traditional ITSM (Information technology service management) tools this approval workflow is orchestrated by the tool but the actions per si are done manually by someone in the operations team that fill some fields in the tool with the explanation of the accomplished activity and close the ticket manually.

In our presentation we’ll demonstrate how we could fill this gap and use Salt API and external pillar to automate all the steps of the process including the execution of actions and closing the ticket with the status of the execution. This approach could be extended for many use cases and adjusted for all major ITSM tools. Many other aspected of the execution could be considered like scheduling of action for maintenance hours and retry of operations to support systems that could be disconnected on some hours of the day like Desktops. Our approach will increasingly reduce manual work for all mapped activities and lower time to response to tickets.

This session will be presented by me and another colleague at the company. A demo will be presented with sharing of code for a scenario of integration.

Track 3

Tom Hatch

Founder, Salt Project

Plug In Oriented Programming—Why it’s a Big Deal, How it’s Being Used, and What the Future Looks Like.

Plugin Oriented Programming is a new programming paradigm that is gaining momentum. Being able to develop in this new mindset can accelerate your code and makes community growth easier.

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Networking Hour

Track 1

Tom Hatch

Founder, Salt Project

The Banana Problem!

Bananas are delicious, but they are in danger. Come and learn that the same industrial concepts that put bananas in danger also creates issues for the tech world.

Track 2

Barney Sowood

Infrastructure Automation Consultant, Corsac Ltd.

Strategies for Testing Salt States

Salt states are a powerful tool for ensuring the state of your infrastructure, but as the number of services and systems being managed with Salt gets bigger, how do you ensure that your states are getting better? How do you allow your team to move faster, whilst making your infrastructure stronger?

In this session we will go through a series of strategies for testing Salt states that build on each other to provide a comprehensive solution for testing and validation. We will start with setting up a development environment that allows for easy local testing and a quick feedback loop. We will then look at tools for linting and discuss testing with pytest and Testinfra. Next, we’ll cover how to use these tools with Docker and integrate that with CI systems, showing examples with Github Actions and Gitlab CI. Finally, we’ll cover how to use testing and CI to validate states against multiple environments, operating systems, and versions of Salt.

Barney will give real world examples of how these strategies have allowed the teams he work with to scale up the number of systems, applications, and environments they manage with Salt whilst continuing improve the quality of their states and being able to move fast with confidence.

Track 3

Vincent Riccio

VMware Technical Marketing Manager

Updates on progress with vRealize Automation and SaltStack Config Integrations.

Track 1

Hans Strijker

Mechanical engineer

Salt at home, with Windows, Linux, and WSL.

Hans has a few raspberry pis running Debian and Raspbian in various functions, a Solaris (soon to be Debian) fileserver, and windows desktops and laptops with WSL. Keeping everything configured right and updated is a chore. He came across Salt through Sue (then Snow) in Geldermalsen, which seemed really a great match. Hybrid setups require a lot of mental gymnastics, and Salt’s unified structure helps with that. Hans is currently in the process of redoing all of his networks and systems at home. He hasn’t finished it all yet, but he’s been working on also getting WSL to be a development environment for IntelliJ Idea on Windows, and have minions running on WSL, which get started automatically through currently a line in ~/.bashrc, but have been looking to change that to a wsl.exe command on windows boot.

Track 2

Dave Boucha

Senior Solution Engineer, VMware

SaltStack SecOps: Its History, Its Development and a Demo.

Learn a little about the history and origin of SaltStack SecOps. We’ll discuss how the SaltStack SecOps Content team builds and tests SecOps content and then we’ll demo SaltStack SecOps.

Track 3

Sheri Byrne-Haber

Senior Staff, Accessibility Architect VMware

The importance of accessibility

Most software sales to a public entity require compliance with WCAG 2.0 or 2.1 Level AA. Do you know what that is and how to get there? There are many ways to achieve this compliance, some better than others. This talk will discuss what people with disabilities need to be equally able to use software and the best approach to building in accessibility from the outset.

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Networking Hour

Track 1

Tom Hatch

Founder of Salt Project

The Tom Hatch AMA

Now is your chance to ask Tom anything. No really–ask him anything!

Track 2

Gareth Greenway

Senior Member, Salt Core Team

Customizing Salt for Fun and Profit

The Salt project is divided up into various modules types, some of these commonly used ones included remote execution modules and state modules, but included in these various components such as engine modules, beacon modules, proxy minion modules, and returners. The use cases that the various modules that are included within a Salt project installation are quite extensive, however, they cannot cover every single use case that exists or support every single subsystem that an organization might want to manage using Salt. This is where the ability to write and distribute custom Salt modules shines. In this talk we’ll briefly explore the various modules types and what they do, we’ll look at the various Salt internals that are available when writing Salt modules, we’ll look at writing some simple modules, and finally we’ll look at some recent additions to the Salt project that make it easier to distribute and share custom modules.

Track 3

Wayne Werner

Senior Member, Salt Core Team

A taste of Testing With Salt

An introduction to testing with Salt, for those interested in contributing to the Salt Project but aren’t quite sure how.

Track 1

Vincent Riccio and Dale Hassinger

VMware Technical Marketing Manager and Lead Systems Engineer – SME vExpert

Managing Windows with SaltStack Config

Track 2

Erik Johnson

Lead Network Automation Engineer, Lumen Technologies

Orchestration Use Case: Deploying an Open-Source Pastebin

Track 3

Tom Hatch

Founder of Salt Project

An In-depth Look at the new Idem Project

Get your first look at this powerful new sibling to Salt from the man who created both!

All Tracks

Networking Hour

Track 1

Michael "Maki" Kato

VP Engineering, Matrix Group International.

Our git based salt workflow

What Maki wanted was a workflow that worked like this:

  • 0) salt config is kept in git
  • 1) changes to staging branch would be automatically deployed to salt master and high state executed in production with test=True and the results captured in a CI pipeline. This allows the team to assess the impact of the change before applying in production.
  • 2) at some point staging is merged into main branch
  • 3) changes to main branch automatically deploys to salt master and high state is executed in production with test=False.
  • 4) optionally scheduled tasks run applying main branch with test=True
  • 5) scheduled task runs applying high state with test=False regularly
Track 2

Alex Peay and Karl Fultz

Director, Product Management, VMware and Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

Continuous Compliance and Vulnerability Management with vRealize Automation

Learn how VMware vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps provides continuous compliance enforcement and vulnerability management for your workloads. We will show how CIS and STIG benchmarks are used with CVEs to establish your compliance and security posture, then remediate workloads. This session will include limited slides and extensive demonstrations.

Track 3

Alyssa Rock

Staff Technical Writer, VMware

Growing a Healthy DevOps Community Inside Salt Project

Our world is made better by open source communities and professional organizations that help people exchange best practices, grow their networks, and collaborate together to build the tech that will power tomorrow’s tools. In its first eight years, the Salt Project established itself as one of those communities, especially for professionals working in DevOps and IT. But what about the next eight years? In this presentation, Alyssa Rock will take some insights she has learned as a leader and community manager of two highly successful open source communities for technical writers. She’ll discuss how these insights could enhance the Salt Project to grow a community of DevOps professionals that work together to skill up, exchange best practices, and collaborate together to solve tomorrow’s biggest system administration problems.

Track 1

Tom Hatch

Founder of Salt Project

A Deep Dive Into Tiamat. This is Why You Should Be Using It.

Python is one of the most widely used programing languages in the world. Because it is easy, reliable and dynamic. But Python has one major drawback, building and delivery. Come and learn about how Tiamat is solving this problem by making Python code easily buildable and deployable.

Track 2

Tyler Johnson

Software Engineer, VMware

Getting Started Plugin Oriented Programming

POP is a concept that evolved from salt philosophy and is now the core of several projects including SSE, idem, Tiamat, and heist. POP has become an integral part of many salt projects; Learning pop will help you become a key player in emerging technologies. We will look at the POP ecosystem as a whole and see how everything fits together. You will learn how to contribute to a POP project, write a plugin to an existing project, and build your own POP project from scratch!

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Demo Jam

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Networking Hour