One of the first things I needed to get a handle on when I began to use Saltstack was pillar and the various YAML and JINJA formatting techniques. At the time of this writing I didnt see too many beginning to end examples so I thought I would start writing about how I am implementing Saltstack. My intent is to build on this example and end up with a modular deployment using Pillar to manage all the aspects of my infrastructure. In the following example I will create an ipsec state that we can use to dynamically open ports for …