salt stack. What is the purpose of Pillars and Mine?

Question

linux

I'm slowly poking around in setting up servers and deploying software. Operations are quite uniform and simple.
The choice fell on SaltStack .

Why not Ansible?

Да потому что стабильно работает, и без глюков. Job'ы Ansible'a же могут просто уйти в даун или повиснуть "без ответа". Нахрен его короче ...
Наверное можно было бы Chef, но почему то до него просто не дошло.

Actually the question is in the title. Examples from the docks are not very intelligible and it is not clear "why is this done?".
For example, I saw 2 examples of creating users - in one, users were written in the SLS file, in the other, in SLS , I pulled users from Pillar and bypassed them with a forych. What is the advantage of the second approach over the first, because the first is somewhat easier to read?
SaltStack Mine - I read the doc, honestly. But why it did not understand.

Answer 1

Pillars is a variable/data sheet that targets specific minions. They allow, for example, to reuse the same formula/statefile, filling different variables through pillars for different minions. In a sense, this is an analogue of Grains, but Grains generates and stores the minion itself, while Pillars are transferred from the master to the minion at the time the state is rendered on the master, which makes it a safe transport for sensitive data, such as passwords, because other minions will not be able to get them from the master unless they are the target of those pillars.
Mine is a way to automatically collect certain data from minions and share it with all other minions, pulling some scripts when this data changes. Allows, for example, to get the private IP addresses of all known backends of our application and automatically update their list on HAProxy.