Running States in Parallel¶

Introduced in Salt version 2017.7.0 it is now possible to run select states in parallel. This is accomplished very easily by adding the parallel: True option to your state declaration:

nginx:
  service.running:
    - parallel: True

Now nginx will be started in a separate process from the normal state run and will therefore not block additional states.

Parallel States and Requisites¶

Parallel States still honor requisites. If a given state requires another state that has been run in parallel then the state runtime will wait for the required state to finish.

Given this example:

sleep 10:
  cmd.run:
    - parallel: True

nginx:
  service.running:
    - parallel: True
    - require:
      - cmd: sleep 10

sleep 5:
  cmd.run:
    - parallel: True

The sleep 10 will be started first, then the state system will block on starting nginx until the sleep 10 completes. Once nginx has been ensured to be running then the sleep 5 will start.

This means that the order of evaluation of Salt States and requisites are still honored, and given that in the above case, parallel: True does not actually speed things up.

To run the above state much faster make sure that the sleep 5 is evaluated before the nginx state

sleep 10:
  cmd.run:
    - parallel: True

sleep 5:
  cmd.run:
    - parallel: True

nginx:
  service.running:
    - parallel: True
    - require:
      - cmd: sleep 10

Now both of the sleep calls will be started in parallel and nginx will still wait for the state it requires, but while it waits the sleep 5 state will also complete.

Things to be Careful of¶

Parallel States do not prevent you from creating parallel conflicts on your system. This means that if you start multiple package installs using Salt then the package manager will block or fail. If you attempt to manage the same file with multiple states in parallel then the result can produce an unexpected file.

Make sure that the states you choose to run in parallel do not conflict, or else, like in any parallel programming environment, the outcome may not be what you expect. Doing things like just making all states run in parallel will almost certainly result in unexpected behavior.

With that said, running states in parallel should be safe the vast majority of the time and the most likely culprit for unexpected behavior is running multiple package installs in parallel.