SaltStack for Google Compute Engine

SaltStack was built for the performance, reliability, security and scale delivered by Google Compute Engine. Needless to say we are very excited to support the launch and general availability of Google Compute Engine.



SaltStack is a systems automation and configuration management framework written in Python and built from the start to be fast, scalable and open while being simple to use yet flexible enough to meet the challenge of any data center automation task. In just two years SaltStack became the eighth biggest and most active open source project on GitHub at the end of 2012, and thousands of the largest infrastructures in the world are already heavily Salted.



Together SaltStack and Google are working to help developers get code into production faster and to help engineers command and control compute resources quickly and easily. If you are new to SaltStack or Salt Cloud, let’s get on the same page. There is a good chance you are using SaltStack and Google Compute Engine together with plans to build really big, large-scale things that will most likely require:

• Rapid access to substantial compute resources;


• Cost-aware and efficient compute consumption;


• High-quality, hardened and secure VMs;


• Flexibility to do things in unique and fluid ways;


• Software that can keep up with the speed and scale of cloud;


• Easy, open and portable infrastructure control through a data-centric approach to automation;


• Autonomic, event-driven compute resources that autoscale to demand or lack thereof.

SaltStack can be first used to deploy Google Compute Engine resources and then to provide ongoing management and automation of Compute Engine VMs and configuration management of the application stacks running in that environment.



So let’s dive a little deeper to see what else is possible now within a Salted Compute Engine environment. To start managing  Compute Engine with SaltStack, here is a handy “Getting Started with Google Compute Engine” tutorial to help. Dependencies simply require:

• Source install of Libcloud (or greater than 0.14.0-beta3 when available)


• A Google Cloud Platform account with Google Compute Engine enabled;


• A registered Google service account for authorization;


• SaltStack.

Configure Salt Cloud next:

Once you have a Salted GCE environment it is time to utilize SaltStack to deploy and control virtual machines in milliseconds while managing application configurations and doing continuous code integration and deployment. SaltStack users often command and control Google Compute Engine resources alongside other cloud environments and infrastructure. Join us at SaltConf in January to see all of this in action.



Google is the epitome of scale, while SaltStack was designed from the start to deliver systems automation for Web scale, cloud and big enterprise IT. So let’s do big things together.



-Contributed by Thomas Hatch, CTO and co-founder, SaltStack