Saltstack Interview Questions and Answers

Saltstack Interview Questions and Answers

Salt is an open-source configuration management software and remote execution engine.  It is based on Python programming. Supporting the “Infrastructure as Code” approach to deployment and cloud management, it competes primarily with Puppet, Chef, and Ansible. The software provides configuration management for IT operations, DevOps and CloudOps environments. An open source version of SaltStack is known as Salt Open or Salt OSS. SaltStack allows the remote administration of infrastructure in an easy-to-install, multi-platform package with a simplified command line interface.  It is written in Python, SaltStack can use scripts written directly in that language and can render scripts written in other languages such as YAML or JSON through the PyDSL Salt renderer. Salt allows parallel execution of multiple commands encrypted via AES and offers both vertical and horizontal scaling. SaltStack intelligent orchestration software helps enterprise IT ops & DevOps teams configure & manage the software-defined datacenter.

First released in 2011 and Developed by     Thomas Hatch. Present used by Rackspace, LinkedIn, Harvard University. Current version is saltstack 2018.3.3 ( 24 october 2018)

What is Salt?

What are the main features of Saltstack?

What is the main purpose of Saltstack?

What are the advantages of SaltStack?

What is Cron in Saltstack?

What is targeting minions in Salt?

Explain Salt Cloud?

Does salt support backing up managed files?

What is the event system in saltstack?

What is a salt proxy-minions?

What is the best way to restart a salt minion daemon using salt after upgrade?

What is Minion Data Cache?

I’m trying to manage packages/services but i get an error saying that the state is not available. Why?

Why aren’t my custom modules/states/etc. available on my minions?

How does salt determine the minion's id?

Why did the value for a grain change on its own?

Is it possible to deploy a file to a specific minion, without other minions having access to it?

What are the limitations of saltstack?