Salt Fundamentals

Salt gives you one control plane for remote execution, configuration management, and orchestration. You can ask many systems to act now. You can also declare the state they should maintain.

Those two modes solve different problems:

• Remote execution calls a function on selected systems and returns the results.
• Configuration management applies state declarations that describe required outcomes.
• Orchestration coordinates ordered work across systems from the master.

The useful mental model is a publish, execute, return loop. A master publishes a job. Matching minions execute it. Each minion returns a result.

Master, minion, target, function

A master runs the salt-master service and publishes jobs. A minion runs the salt-minion service, subscribes to jobs, executes matching work, and returns data.

A basic command has four parts:

salt '*' test.version

Part	Meaning
salt	Send a job through the master
'*'	Target every accepted minion
test	Execution module
version	Function in that module

Execution modules expose functions such as package, service, file, network, and system operations. You can inspect their documentation before calling them.

The master does not send every job to a private channel for one minion. It publishes work, and minions determine whether the target matches them. Targeting is therefore part of the safety boundary.

Identity and trust