Salt Cloud is built-in to Salt and is configured on and executed from your Salt Master.
The first step is to add the credentials for your cloud host. Credentials and other settings provided by the cloud host are stored in provider configuration files. Provider configurations contain the details needed to connect to a cloud host such as EC2, GCE, Rackspace, etc., and any global options that you want set on your cloud minions (such as the location of your Salt Master).
On your Salt Master, browse to /etc/salt/cloud.providers.d/
and create a file called <provider>.provider.conf
,
replacing <provider>
with ec2
, softlayer
, and so on. The name helps you identify the contents, and is not
important as long as the file ends in .conf
.
Next, browse to the Provider specifics and add any required settings for your cloud host to this file. Here is an example for Amazon EC2:
my-ec2:
driver: ec2
# Set the EC2 access credentials (see below)
#
id: 'HJGRYCILJLKJYG'
key: 'kdjgfsgm;woormgl/aserigjksjdhasdfgn'
# Make sure this key is owned by root with permissions 0400.
#
private_key: /etc/salt/my_test_key.pem
keyname: my_test_key
securitygroup: default
# Optional: Set up the location of the Salt Master
#
minion:
master: saltmaster.example.com
The required configuration varies between cloud hosts so make sure you read the provider specifics.
You can now query the cloud provider you configured for available locations, images, and sizes. This information is used when you set up VM profiles.
salt-cloud --list-locations <provider_name> # my-ec2 in the previous example
salt-cloud --list-images <provider_name>
salt-cloud --list-sizes <provider_name>
Replace <provider_name>
with the name of the provider configuration you defined.
On your Salt Master, browse to /etc/salt/cloud.profiles.d/
and create a file called <provider>.profiles.conf
,
replacing <provider>
with ec2
, softlayer
, and so on. The file must end in .conf
.
You can now add any custom profiles you'd like to define to this file. Here are a few examples:
micro_ec2:
provider: my-ec2
image: ami-d514f291
size: t1.micro
medium_ec2:
provider: my-ec2
image: ami-d514f291
size: m3.medium
large_ec2:
provider: my-ec2
image: ami-d514f291
size: m3.large
Notice that the provider
in our profile matches the provider name that we defined? That is how Salt Cloud
knows how to connect to create a VM with these attributes.
VMs are created by calling salt-cloud
with the following options:
salt-cloud -p <profile> <name1> <name2> ...
For example:
salt-cloud -p micro_ec2 minion1 minion2
create()
Function