salt/doc/topics/releases/0.16.0.rst

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Salt 0.16.0 Release Notes
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The 0.16.0 release is an exciting one, with new features in master redundancy,
and a new, powerful requisite.

Major Features
==============

Multi-Master
------------

This new capability allows for a minion to be actively connected to multiple
salt masters at the same time. This allows for multiple masters to send out commands
to minions and for minions to automatically reconnect to masters that have gone
down.

Prereq, the New Requisite
-------------------------

The new `prereq` requisite is very powerful! It allows for states to execute
based on a state that is expected to make changes in the future. This allows
for a change on the system to be preempted by another execution. A good example
is needing to shut down a service before modifying files associated with it,
allowing, for instance, a webserver to be shut down allowing a load balancer to
stop sending requests while server side code is updated. In this case, the
prereq will only run if changes are expected to happen in the prerequired
state, and the prerequired state will always run after the prereq state and
only if the prereq state succeeds.

Muliple Targets for pkg.removed, pkg.purged States
--------------------------------------------------

Both the :mod:`pkg.removed <salt.states.pkg.removed>` and :mod:`pkg.purged
<salt.states.pkg.purged>` now support the ``pkgs`` argument, which allow for
multiple packages to be targeted in a single state. This, as in
:mod:`pkg.installed <salt.states.pkg.installed>`, helps speed up these
states by reducing the number of times that the package management tools (apt,
yum, etc.) need to be run.

Random Times in Cron States
---------------------------

The temporal parameters in :mod:`cron.present <salt.states.cron.present>`
states (minute, hour, etc.) can now be randomized by using ``random`` instead
of a specific value. However, please note that if a cron job already has a
numeric value (in other words, not ``*``), changing the value to ``random``
will not modify this field in the crontab. Otherwise, the value would be
modified every time the state was applied.