Migration from ansible to saltstack

Question

We have a large AWS infrastructure which we manage and configure using ansible. I want to try and move our configuration management to saltstack. I've setup a server to be the salt-master and salt-minion in a smaller VPC that we have.

I have done the basic configuration and can do basic commands like:

salt-cloud -f list_nodes <provider-name>
salt-cloud -a get_tags <node_name>

I've created a state for nginx and was able to install it locally. Now, i want to be able to manage all the other EC2 nodes in the VPC using saltstack.

I intend to move the roles from Ansible to Saltstack. That is not the issue.

I want to be able to to salt '*' test.ping for example and get responses from the existing EC2 nodes. Does that mean installing salt-minion on all the existing nodes and accepting their keys and that should be the way to go?

I have question not related. Could you please explain why migrate from ansible to salt-stack? Are there any serious improvements? — Navern, May 11 '15 at 20:03
@MichaelHampton - to see what I can do with ansible to get workable setup. — adele dazim, May 12 '15 at 03:14
@Navern I'm merely trying to POC it in a smaller environment to see if it is better. I got the idea from here -> http://ryandlane.com/blog/2014/08/04/moving-away-from-puppet-saltstack-or-ansible/ — adele dazim, May 12 '15 at 03:14

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 12 '15 at 00:49

Migrating from Ansible to Salt is a 2-3 step process if you exclude all of the details such as writing new statefiles and defining minions and groups of servers in the top file, setting up pillar data and mine functions, and so on.

Make a Salt-master server.
Use Ansible to install salt-minion on your nodes.
Accept minion keys, unless you set your master to auto-accept.

Of course, all minions will need to be able to resolve salt to the IP address of your master, and be able to connect to it on TCP 4505 and 4506.

Migration from ansible to saltstack

1 Answers1