SaltStack is known as a popular configuration management system, but that barely scratches the surface. It is, in fact, a powerful automation suite, which is designed not only to help you manage your servers, but to help them manage themselves. SaltStack is used worldwide by organizations ranging from just a few servers, to tens of thousands of nodes across data centers in multiple continents. This award-winning software is fast becoming the standard for systems management in the cloud world. This book will take you through the advanced features of SaltStack, bringing forward capabilities that will help you excel in the management of your servers. You will be taken through the the mind of the modern systems engineer, and discover how they use Salt to manage their infrastructures, and why those design decisions are so important. The inner workings of Salt will be explored, so that as you advance your knowledge of Salt, you will be able to swim with the current, rather than against it. Various subsystems of Salt are explained in detail, including Salt SSH, Salt Cloud, and external pillars, filesystems, and job caches. You will be taken through an in-depth discussion of how to effectively scale Salt to manage thousands of machines, and how to troubleshoot issues when things don't go exactly the way you expect them to. You will also be taken through an overview of RAET, Salt's new transport protocol, and given an insight into how this technology improves Salt, and the possibilities that it brings with it. This book is ideal for professionals who have been managing groups of servers, and want to learn how to add functionality and expand their tool set. This book will also explain some of the more advanced features of Salt, and explore how to use them to bring additional power to the fundamentals that the professionals have already been using. This book speaks informally, sometimes almost conversationally, to the user. Topics are covered in detail, using examples that should be comfortable to most users.