If you have an active VMware Aria Automation Standard subscription, you are eligible to access the Automation Config service.

What is Automation Config

As IT system administrators and DevOps team members, you are aware that your role involves more than setting up servers and running services. VMware Aria Automation Config helps your team automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensures that all the components of your infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.

Note: Going forward, Automation Config is no longer included in the Aria Automation suite of products. The new name of this product is VMware Tanzu Salt and this product is available as part of the VMware Tanzu Platform suite of products. See Using and Managing Tanzu Salt for more information.

Automation Config is pluggable and plays well with many existing technologies. You don't have to refactor all of your existing configuration management systems to use Automation Config. It can react to the output codes and information from third-party tools to manage the entire machine life cycle.

Important:

Automation Config runs on Salt, an open-source automation and configuration management engine. To begin using Automation Config for configuration management, you also must install and run the Salt master service and the Salt minion service on any nodes that you intend to manage using Automation Config.

You are responsible for managing the deployment, upgrade, and decommission of Salt masters and Salt minions. You can deploy Salt masters and Salt minions in public cloud providers, on-premises, or in another hosted solution. The deployment location is subject to your infrastructure needs.

Automation Config Architecture

Automation Config is deployed as a single-tenant instance and can scale to meet your infrastructure's needs.

VMware manages your Automation Config instance, which includes:

  • Redis database
  • PostgreSQL database
  • Automation Config API server, also known as RaaS
  • Automation Config user interface