salt/doc/topics/releases/0.14.0.rst

=========================
Salt 0.14.0 Release Notes
=========================

Salt 0.14.0 is here! This release was held up primarily by PyCon, Scale and
illness, but has arrived! 0.14.0 comes with many new features and is breaking
ground for Salt in the area of cloud management with the introduction of Salt
providing basic cloud controller functionality.

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

Salt - As a Cloud Controller
----------------------------

This is the first primitive inroad to using Salt as a cloud controller is
available in 0.14.0. Be advised that this is alpha, only tested in a few very
small environments.

The cloud controller is built using kvm and libvirt for the hypervisors.
Hypervisors are autodetected as minions and only need to have libvirt running
and kvm installed to function. The features of the Salt cloud controller are
as follows:

    - Basic vm discovery and reporting
    - Creation of new virtual machines
    - Seeding virtual machines with Salt via qemu-nbd or libguestfs
    - Live migration (shared and non shared storage)
    - Delete existing VMs

It is noteworthy that this feature is still Alpha, meaning that all rights
are reserved to change the interface if needs be in future releases!

Libvirt State
-------------

One of the problems with libvirt is management of certificates needed for live
migration and cross communication between hypervisors. The new ``libvirt``
state makes the Salt Master hold a CA and manage the signing and distribution
of keys onto hypervisors, just add a call to the libvirt state in the sls
formulas used to set up a hypervisor:

.. code-block:: yaml

    libvirt_keys:
      libvirt.keys

New get Functions
-----------------

An easier way to manage data has been introduced. The pillar, grains and config
execution modules have been extended with the new ``get`` function. This
function works much in the same way as the get method in a python dict, but with
an enhancement, nested dict components can be extracted using a `:` delimiter.

If a structure like this is in pillar:

.. code-block:: yaml

    foo:
      bar:
        baz: quo

Extracting it from the raw pillar in an sls formula or file template is done
this way:

.. code-block:: jinja

    {{ pillar['foo']['bar']['baz'] }}

Now with the new get function the data can be safely gathered and a default
can be set allowing the template to fall back if the value is not available:

.. code-block:: jinja

    {{ salt['pillar.get']('foo:bar:baz', 'qux') }}

This makes handling nested structures much easier, and defaults can be cleanly
set. This new function is being used extensively in the new formulae repository
of salt sls formulas.