If you don’t see a sign-up form or videos below, please disable your ad blocker for this page.

Keynote Sessions

SaltConf19 Opening Keynotes



Tom Hatch, SaltStack CTO

Moe Abdula, SaltStack SVP of Engineering

Brian Armstrong, IBM Cloud network engineering executive

Darrin Thomason, Arista Networks director and solutions architect

Marc Chenn, SaltStack CEO



SaltConf19 kicks off with a power-packed lineup of speakers including Tom Hatch, SaltStack CTO, Moe Abdula, SaltStack SVP of engineering, Marc Chenn, SaltStack CEO, Brian Armstrong, IBM Cloud network engineering executive, Darrin Thomason, Arista Networks director and solutions architect, and guest appearances from SaltStack customers and Salt working group captains. Learn about the growth of the Salt open source project and community through the last seven years, and hear what new innovation projects Tom has been working on. Learn how IBM Cloud uses SaltStack to automate the work of securing and maintaining 80,000 network devices including 40,000 Arista devices.

Meet the Experts

Tom Hatch, SaltStack CTO



Moe Abdula, SaltStack SVP of Engineering



SaltStack Core Engineering Team



Salt Working Group Captains



Every year this is the most popular and well-attended breakout session at SaltConf. A panel of Salt community experts including Thomas Hatch, Moe Abudula, members of the SaltStack core engineering team, and Salt Working Group captains, will answer questions submitted by the Salt community.

Closing Keynotes

Marc Chenn, SaltStack CEO



Mark Sunday, Oracle CIO Emeritus



Renee Murphy, Forrester Research Principal Analyst



Will Gregorian, Addepar Vice President and CISO



SaltConf19 closing keynotes are delivered by IT and security operations luminaries including Mark Sunday, Oracle CIO, Renee Murphy, Forrester Research principal analyst covering risk and compliance, Will Gregorian, Addepar CISO, and Marc Chenn, SaltStack CEO. Watch these keynote presentations to find the right balance between innovation and security, risk and compliance, and IT and security operations. And don’t miss the big SaltStack Protect announcement from Marc. SaltStack is providing intelligent automation and collaboration to SecOps teams to help businesses truly secure production infrastructure.

Breakout Sessions

November 18 – 19

Infrastructure Automation



Learn how Innovative IT and Network teams are harnessing SaltStack to bring their infrastructure into the digital age.



CenturyLink

Brad Chapin, Lead Architect



Matt Flynn, Lead Network Engineer



Erik Johnson, Lead System Engineer



Using Environments to Manage Safe, Large-scale Deployments

The CDN team within CenturyLink supports ~20K customer-facing servers, worldwide. Our production network is divided into three main segments (with many smaller roles and variations) Trial – 5%, Network Readiness Testing – 20%, and General Availability – 75%. We support both software deployment and automated repair, so any automated repair must rebuild the server exactly as before the failure. Each customer has control over a very flexible set of configurations, so corner cases are difficult to identify until the code and configurations have been rolled to production and we identify servers operating in a sub-standard way. We are using the formula model alongside environments within Salt to deploy multiple versions of the same codebase to the master at the same time, and the role/environment for the server determines which code base is used and which configurations applied.

Everbridge

Keith Murphy, Principal Database Reliability Engineer

Using Salt to manage more than configuration

At Everbridge we use Salt to handle hundreds of server deployments across Prod, Stage, QA and dev. Within our DRE (Data Reliability Engineering) group we manage several hundred servers using Salt automation far beyond simple configuration and server builds. After the initial server build / configuration we do the following:

Configure replication between servers in a cluster ( mongo, elasticsearch , postgres, mysql )

Configure backups as well as manage those backups long term

Update Debian base packaging on servers for security updates

Manage service upgrades of mongo, elasticsearch, kibana, postgres and mysql ( ie moving from Mongo 3.4 to Mongo 3.6)

Configuration of ephemeral development environments including loading of seed data post setup

This session will cover some of the many ways we can use Salt as a tool to manage our large scale environments.

NICE Nexidia



Greg Grieves, DevOps Engineer

Jim Watson, Systems Operations Engineer



Applying Cloud Tools in a Legacy Environment

Legacy applications were not designed for the cloud and take a long time to be modernized. Inherent difficulties exist when trying to manage legacy applications and legacy environments that are highly nonuniform. Needing distinct states for every server precludes some of the best advantages of automation using SaltStack. Here we show a technique that allows us to treat application deployment, configuration management, monitoring and automated validation as code in an environment generally where nearly every server is configured uniquely. This technique is easily deployed, managed in source control, and naturally reduces to simple roles as the environment evolves into higher uniformity and eventually transitions to the cloud.

Kuali

Ben Gridley, Sr. Site Reliability Engineer Lead

Managing AWS Infrastructure using Salt, Git, and Docker

Managing infrastructure as code in AWS is not as easy as it seems. Many tools exist, but only seem to be focused on the setup and not the long term care of your infrastructure. Almost none of the other tools out there are able to manage AWS resources in the state defined in code or are unable to make all the required changes to existing infrastructure without deleting and starting over, which can result in errors. SaltStack has a solution to these problems with their state modules and can be extended to manage any issue that comes up. We will discuss why Salt was selected to manage our AWS Infrastructure and some of the issues that the other tools couldn’t deal with, that SaltStack handles amazingly. Using a docker container running a salt-minion we are able to schedule container tasks that run in regular intervals that uses external pillar from a git repository containing all of our infrastructure as Pillar data. This ensures zero drift in our infrastructure and allows us to make changes to our infrastructure using version control.

Bloomberg



Matthew Phillips, Engineer – R&D Network Design & Infrastructure

Austin Papp, Platform Engineer



Orchestration Testing Lessons Learned

The Salt ecosystem provides a variety of approaches to testing Salt states for a single machine: Kitchen-Salt, Saltcheck, and Salt’s own internal test suite. But how do you test a multi-machine orchestration? This talk will look at the approach the Infrastructure Engineering team at Bloomberg has taken to handle multi-machine orchestration testing. In it, we will cover topics including Pytest, Docker, Docker Compose, test-kitchen, and Testinfra.

IBM Cloud

Stephen Dumesnil, Manager, Network Engineering Governance

Automating continuous compliance and security for the IBM Cloud network

In this talk, Stephen Dumesnil will discuss how his team uses SaltStack SecOps automation as part of a business-wide effort to scope, mitigate, and audit problems in hours rather than weeks across a global data center with over 80,000 network devices. Learn how the team is automating and orchestrating compliance detection and remediation efforts to deliver dramatic improvements in efficiency, including a 75% reduction in the time needed to coordinate priorities between security and IT operations teams and resolve network compliance and security issues.

Liberty Mutual Insurance

Greg Fraize, Security Engineer

Intelligent Security Automation for Juniper Firewalls and Beyond

In this talk, Greg Fraize will discuss learnings and takeaways from a recent project that required the Liberty Mutual security team—with support from Juniper, Integration Partners, and SaltStack—to use SaltStack intelligent automation to create self-healing Junos firewalls and orchestrate response to Splunk security events.

Tips, Tricks, & Best Practices

SaltStack power users dish the latest tips and tricks to help you get more Salt in your diet.

Ericsson

Georg Schmuecking, System Designer

DMZ-Salt-master for Onboarding Hardware

In this talk I will present the DMZ concept we use in Ericsson Industry Connect to onboard unconfigured servers at the customer site into our cloud environments. Our Ericsson Industry Connect solution sets up an On-Premise private LTE solution. Next to our cloud, running the user frontend and many other configuration and maintenance tools, we deploy two servers at the customer site. These run the individual packet cores for each customer. We use SaltStack to install, configure, and manage a large number of these highly distributed individual servers, remotely. Very quickly we noticed that we had to split our cloud environment into regional environments. This was necessary in order to be able to scale up to thousands of Customers, keep our latency commitments, and be present in different geographical areas. The split presented us with the challenge to remotely onboard the unconfigured servers into the different cloud environments, without any pre-configuration or identification of the server itself. We therefore used a DMZ-Concept and introduced an additional Salt-Master, which onboards the server. It also does initial updates and checks on the software and physical installation, and is then able to migrate the server into the respective cloud environment and handover to the respective salt-master from the cloud environment. I will present the details about the setup with the DMZ-Salt-Master, a custom remote-salt-api execution module for that purpose, and the migration process from the DMZ-Salt-Master to the Cloud-Salt-Master.

Agfa

Philipp Lemke, TeC-S Solution Architect | Team Lead

Automate Monitoring with Salt and CheckMK

As Managed Service Provider in Healthcare Business, Agfa HealthCare is responsible for distributed clinical IT-Environments. To ensure that we are able to deliver a high quality service to our customers we decided to support our processes with the solutions Salt & CheckMK. Learn how to:

Synergies between Salt & CheckMK

Add your Salt-Minions automatically to a full functional monitoring environment

Install CheckMK Monitoring Agents via Salt

Use Salt Grains within CheckMK

Advanced Automation Concepts

Learn how innovative teams are tackling big, complex IT challenges with bleeding-edge automation concepts and the power of SaltStack

Domotz

Massimiliano Cuzzoli, Head of Cloud & System Engineering

SaltStack for Preventive Maintenance with Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis

In this session, Massimiliano Cuzzoli will discuss how Domotz is experimenting with SaltStack to deploy features commonly exposed in AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations). Specifically, Anomaly Detection + Root Cause Analysis. We monitor system parameters like cpu, memory, number of processes, network latency, and so on. The huge amount of information collected to produce historical trends may be noisy and simple threshold-based alerts typically trigger a lot of false positives. We need something clever to spot unexpected behaviors. We need pattern recognition algorithms usually borrowed by the AI field. The SaltStack event bus is giving us a powerful data gathering system along with the ability to implement our own logic on top of collected data, performing correlations and taking actions.

Pluralsight

Theo Cowan, DevOps Engineer

Turbocharge your DevOps pipeline with Salt

Learn how Pluralsight uses a standardized SaltStack formula called systemd-app, to deploy applications of any type including; java, nodejs, python, ruby as well as containerized applications as daemons, adhocs and scheduled tasks. The process is safe, reliable and fast, giving Pluralsight unprecedented ease as well as complete control of how it does DevOps.

UNC Charlotte

Trevon Williams. PhD student

Defense Automation: SaltStack in a BuzzWord Rich Environment

The goal of the body of research I am engaging in is to combine Software Defined Network (SDN) technologies, Network Function Virtualization techniques, and Linux containers (LXD) to create a programmable environment that introduces a higher a level of autonomic features. This proposed environment will address automated configuration and response in a plethora of environment/infrastructure OSI levels. Given the current centralized architecture of the software defined network switch and controller integration, I am utilizing SaltStack to create an event driven API to handle the container and network configurations when triggered by generically defined events. As read here: https://trevon.dev/2019/08/04/Research-Introduction.html

Integrate and Extend

Extending the power of your existing toolset with SaltStack

SUSE

Pablo Suárez Hernández, Senior Software Engineer

Running Ansible within Salt: How to smoothly migrate away from Ansible to Salt



At SUSE we firmly believe that Salt is the best choice for Configuration Management and Orchestration. We actively develop and integrate Salt as a core component of some of our products. Sometimes we face customers and users who chose Ansible as their Configuration Management engine. They invested time and efforts designing all states and playbooks to define their infrastructure. Then, at some point, they realize that with Salt they would have the same functionality and much more: real-time monitoring, reactors, event driven orchestration, superior flexibility, and more. The latest Fluorine release of Salt comes with a new module called ansiblegate which has been started by SUSE and allows a user to run Ansible from within Salt. You can execute any Ansible module directly using Salt and you can even reuse your own Ansible playbooks and apply them using Salt! Since many customers and users have invested time designing their Ansible states and playbooks, this session will show how Salt is able to run Ansible using ansiblegate. That will allow users to smoothly migrate away from Ansible by switching to Salt and reusing all their previous Ansible efforts plus adding all extra value that Salt brings into the scene.

MIT

Sar Haidar, Senior DevOps Engineer

Salt-Proxy To The Rescue: Managing Heroku app configuration variables

This session is about leveraging salt-proxy in conjunction with an in-house Salt module to manage the configuration variables for the Heroku apps we have deployed. I will be covering the workflow prior to piecing this solution together, and then go over all the pieces that were put together, including scheduling, to automate configuration variables in Heroku apps and eliminate the manual intervention that was previously undertaken to replace expired credentials.

Progressive Leasing

Brandon Bird, Sr. Systems Engineer

Mason Edgel, Systems Engineer



Scalable Salt State Version Control with ServiceNow and Git

Progressive Leasing wanted a better method to track Salt State versioning, and wanted to integrate ServiceNow CMDB into our Salt processes. We started using GitFS for deployments, but encountered performance issues when deploying across multiple repos. We implemented our own DevOps tool chain using GitLab runners. The resulting ServiceNow integration allows us to deploy and audit servers based on desired Salt state versions.

Quantyca

Giandomenico Avelluto, Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Create a One Click Migration (OCM) Process to Automate Repeatable Infrastructure migration With Salt

We love Automation, consequently we love SaltStack. Attend this session to learn how we managed part of LastMinute infrastructure migration using Salt capabilities such as Salt Orchestration system, Salt Macros and so on. You also will learn how a “flight plan” and the Salt Reactor system can help you to trace all these steps in a very simple way.

Learn how to:

Integrate Salt with ChatOps

Use a “flight plan” to trace steps

Use Macros for eliminating redundant code

Fuse Solutions

Tom Barnes, Fuse Solutions senior systems administrator

Active Directory Command and Control with SaltStack and Centrify

Managing Active Directory across a global, distributed environment is a tedious challenge. Using SaltStack and Centrify we’ve created a command and control platform leveraging Active Directory for consistency and to eliminate errors. Attend this session to learn how to create custom Salt grains to import data from Centrify and use Active Directory data to make life easier. See how we use computer groups and roles to deploy Salt states, or how we use Sites and Service to add datacenter-specific information into Jinja maps. No more for-loops when you have a lookup table!

Salt on Salt

SaltStack employees share updates, best practices, and what’s next for SaltStack

SaltStack



Thomas Hatch, CTO and Co-founder

Megan Wilhite, Software engineer II

David Hilton, Senior Software Developer



Innovation Projects Deep Dive: POP, Heist and Umbra

SaltStack CTO and Founder, Thomas Hatch, will be joined by SaltStack team project leads Megan Wilhite and David Hilton to discuss three innovative and revolutionary new projects that introduce practical AI/ML concepts into the SaltStack platform, dramatically improve the pluggability of Salt components, and revolutionize agentless system control—and that’s just the beginning.

SaltStack



Pedro Algarvio, Platform Engineer

Wayne Werner, Senior Software Engineer



Test Driven Salt: Best practices for test cases and quality contributions

Creating a test-driven submission approach is critical to driving Salt to the next level of robustness and reliability. Come learn how to write tests for Salt, featuring real-world examples! We will discuss the three primary test styles used to solidify Salt.

SaltStack



Mehul Revankar, Director of Product

Daniel Wozniak, Software Developer



SaltStack Horizons – A look forward at what’s coming in future releases

The SaltStack product team will provide an in-depth look at the SaltStack roadmap across all open and commercial products.

SaltStack

Mehul Revankar, Director of Product

SaltStack – Implementing Foundational Cybersecurity Controls with CIS & SaltStack SecOps

Security operations teams often use multiple regulatory frameworks to guide their cybersecurity strategy. No matter the framework, foundational cybersecurity is a great first step toward compliance. For example, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, and others require IT infrastructure to be configured to a hardened, gold standard. This session outlines how your team can use CIS benchmarks in SaltStack SecOps to make significant strides towards continuous compliance today. We provide an actionable plan for security operations teams to balance compliance and innovation in an era of digital transformation and never-ending security risks.

SaltStack

Thomas Hatch, SaltStack CTO

SaltStack – The Secret to Winning IT Security Roulette

There is too much talk in IT security and not enough action. But the reality is you probably don’t have the people or the tools to effectively act to secure your IT infrastructure. There is hope. Let’s fix IT. The pace of infrastructure growth and resulting complexity is overwhelming. Old security tech and processes, combined with overwhelmed and understaffed IT and security teams, simply can’t protect against a new and evolving threat landscape. Security exploits are proliferating faster than ever before. According to SC Magazine in the first half of 2019 there were almost 4000 unique data breaches resulting in more than 4 billion records being compromised.



