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81 lines
3.6 KiB
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========================
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Salt 0.8.7 release notes
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========================
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It has been a month since salt 0.8.0, and it has been a long month! But Salt is
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still coming along strong. 0.8.7 has a lot of changes and a lot of updates.
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This update makes Salt’s ZeroMQ back end better, strips facter from the
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dependencies, and introduces interfaces to handle more capabilities.
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Many of the major updates are in the background, but the changes should shine
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through to the surface. A number of the new features are still a little thin,
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but the back end to support expansion is in place.
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I also recently gave a presentation to the Utah Python users group in Salt Lake
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City, the slides from this presentation are available here:
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:download:`Salt.pdf`
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The video from this presentation will be available shortly.
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The major new features and changes in Salt 0.8.7 are:
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* Revamp ZeroMQ topology on the master for better scalability
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* State enforcement
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* Dynamic state enforcement managers
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* Extract the module loader into salt.loader
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* Make Job ids more granular
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* Replace facter functionality with the new salt grains interface
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* Support for “virtual” salt modules
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* Introduce the salt-call command
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* Better debugging for minion modules
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The new ZeroMQ topology allows for better scalability, this will be required by
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the need to execute massive file transfers to multiple machines in parallel and
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state management. The new ZeroMQ topology is available in the aforementioned
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presentation.
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0.8.7 introduces the capability to declare states, this is similar to the
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capabilities of Puppet. States in salt are declared via state data structures.
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This system is very young, but the core feature set is available. Salt states
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work around rendering files which represent Salt high data. More on the Salt
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state system will be documented in the near future.
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The system for loading salt modules has been pulled out of the minion class to
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be a standalone module, this has enabled more dynamic loading of Salt modules
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and enables many of the updates in 0.8.7 –
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:blob:`salt/loader.py`
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Salt Job ids are now microsecond precise, this was needed to repair a race
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condition unveiled by the speed improvements in the new ZeroMQ topology.
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The new grains interface replaces the functionality of Facter, the idea behind
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grains differs from Facter in that the grains are only used for static system
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data, dynamic data needs to be derived from a call to a salt module. This makes
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grains much faster to use, since the grains data is generated when the minion
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starts.
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Virtual salt modules allows for a salt module to be presented as something
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other than its module name. The idea here is that based on information from the
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minion decisions about which module should be presented can be made. The best
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example is the pacman module. The pacman module will only load on Arch Linux
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minions, and will be called pkg. Similarly the yum module will be presented as
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pkg when the minion starts on a Fedora/RedHat system.
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The new salt-call command allows for minion modules to be executed from the
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minion. This means that on the minion a salt module can be executed, this is a
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great tool for testing Salt modules. The salt-call command can also be used to
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view the grains data.
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In previous releases when a minion module threw an exception very little data
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was returned to the master. Now the stack trace from the failure is returned
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making debugging of minion modules MUCH easier.
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Salt is nearing the goal of 1.0, where the core feature set and capability is
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complete!
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Salt 0.8.7 can be downloaded from github here:
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:download:`salt-0.8.7.tar.gz`
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-Thomas S Hatch
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