"Help me easily install, deploy, and maintain business critical software and hardware."

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👤 Role

• Junior or mid-level systems administrator.
• Approaches Salt from an Operations, systems administrator, and IT perspective.

🧠 Skill levels

• Salt: Beginner to intermediate
• Operations: Intermediate to advanced
• Development: Beginner to intermediate

🎯 Goals

• Learn how Salt can help them spend less time on the stressful or boring and repetitive parts of system administration and focus more on building an efficient, secure, and self-healing automated systems.
• Identify how Salt can provide solutions for their biggest time sinkholes and bottlenecks, such as system installation and upgrades, software deployment, and preventing or quickly remediating system outages.
• Aspires to grow professionally so they can eventually have the same skills and proficiencies with Salt and systems administration as DevOps Architect Ari.

🧭 Values

• Using Salt to turn "pets" (highly customized machines) into "cattle" (generic machines with standardized deployments and configuration that can scale).
• Playbook of features and common use cases at disposal for streamlining day-to-day tasks and problem-solving processes.
• Trustworthy, recommended, and tested best practices to ensure the reliability and security of systems.

😢 Pain points

• Needs more guidance around the common tasks and workflows that most sys admins use Salt for.
• Struggles to bridge the gap toward stateful management and infrastructure-as-code best practices. For example, they may have frustrations over losing manual changes when to Salt overwrites system configurations that were implemented manually to solve a break/fix.
• Limited time to dive deeply and research which of the many possible solutions Salt provides will be the best approach.
• Uncertainty around Salt's feature set or what it lacks, especially in comparison to similar tools.

📌 Use cases

• Configure, deploy, and maintain hardware and software to maintain business critical operations.
• Monitor and maintain networks on-premises and in cloud environments.
• Automate the new deployments for quick and consistent system configurations.
• Troubleshoot issues with installations, updates, patches, and service failures.
• Write states to define and maintain desired configurations, ensuring a secure and reliable IT environment.
• Implement security measures and adhere to compliance standards.

🥇 Competencies

• Windows systems administration skills.
• Linux/Unix administration skills.
• Ability to write and use shell scripts.
• Expertise in networking protocols for configuring network settings, firewalls, and connectivity.