Salt Cloud 0.8.2 Release Notes¶

Documentation¶

The documentation for Salt Cloud can be found on Read the Docs: https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.io

Download¶

Salt Cloud can be downloaded and install via pypi or github:

https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/salt-cloud/salt-cloud-0.8.2.tar.gz

https://cloud.github.com/downloads/saltstack/salt-cloud/salt-cloud-0.8.2.tar.gz

Some packages have been made available for salt-cloud and more on their way. Packages for Arch, and FreeBSD are being made available thanks to the work of Christer Edwards, and packages for RHEL and Fedora are being created by Clint Savage. Package availability will be announced on the salt mailing list.

Select Query Option¶

The last release of Salt Cloud added the -F/--full query option, to display all information available for a particular instance. We now also have the -S or --select-query option, which lets you specify which fields to display. Any fields not specified will not be displayed, and if you specify a field that doesn't exist on a particular provider, it will be ignored for them. Just add a query.selection option to /etc/salt/cloud like such:

query.selection:
  - id
  - state
  - public_ips
  - keyname
  - TOTALXFER

os vs script¶

In a cloud profile, you need to specify which deploy script to use to install Salt on the newly-provisioned VM. The option for this has always been 'os', which has been confusing to some. As of this release, you may now specify 'script' instead of 'os'. If you specify both, the value for 'script' will be used. See the SmartOS Deploy Script below for an example.

SmartOS Deploy Script¶

Of particular interest to Joyent users may be the new SmartOS deploy script. Salt itself is not fully-supported on SmartOS just yet, in part because ZeroMQ is also not yet supported. When this script is used for deployment, it will automatically install the required libraries and build ZeroMQ, and then use easy_install to install the latest versions of PyZMQ and Salt. To use this, just specify SmartOS as the 'os' or 'script' option in your cloud.profiles:

joyent_smartos:
  provider: joyent
  size: Extra Small 512 MB
  image: smartos
  script: SmartOS

OpenStack and IBM Modules¶

Support has been added for clouds using OpenStack (OPENSTACK) and for IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise (IBMSCE) offering. We know that people have already started using the OpenStack module, because pull requests have already been merged from the community. This module has been tested against both the HP and the Rackspace implementations of OpenStack. This can be a tricky module to configure, depending on your provider, so some examples are provided here:

# For HP
OPENSTACK.identity_url: 'https://region-a.geo-1.identity.hpcloudsvc.com:35357/v2.0/'
OPENSTACK.compute_name: Compute
OPENSTACK.compute_region: 'az-1.region-a.geo-1'
OPENSTACK.tenant: myuser-tenant1
OPENSTACK.user: myuser
OPENSTACK.ssh_key_name: mykey
OPENSTACK.ssh_key_file: '/etc/salt/hpcloud/mykey.pem'
OPENSTACK.password: mypass

# For Rackspace
OPENSTACK.identity_url: 'https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/tokens'
OPENSTACK.compute_name: cloudServersOpenStack
OPENSTACK.compute_region: DFW
OPENSTACK.tenant: 5555555
OPENSTACK.user: myuser
OPENSTACK.password: mypass
OPENSTACK.protocol: ipv4

It is important to note that currently, only password-based authentication is provided through the Salt Cloud OpenStack module.

IBM has fewer things that need to be configured, but setting them up can be tricky as well. An example might look like:

IBMSCE.user: myuser@mycorp.com
IBMSCE.password: mypass
IBMSCE.ssh_key_name: mykey
IBMSCE.ssh_key_file: '/etc/salt/ibm/mykey.pem'
IBMSCE.location: Raleigh

The location currently must be configured in order to create an instance, but not to query the IBM cloud. This is important, because you need to use salt-cloud --list-locations (with the other options already set) in order to find the name of the location that you want to use.

OpenStack with Salt¶

This isn't specifically another Salt Cloud feature, but it should be noted that with the release of Salt 0.10.5, OpenStack is not only the first Cloud product, but in fact the first piece of software explicitly supported by both Salt Cloud (from a user perspective) and Salt itself (from an admin perspective).

Salt Cloud Logging¶

Those who have tried to hack on Salt Cloud may have discovered a complete lack of logging support. With this release, Salt Cloud has started to implement the logging features already available in Salt. The default log location is /var/log/salt/cloud (with a default level of warn), but it can be changed in your cloud configuration file:

log_file: /var/log/salt/cloud
log_level_logfile: debug

If you would like to change the default logging level for the command line, you can also configure that in the same place:

log_level: debug

Check salt-cloud --help for a list of logging levels, which can also be specified from the command line.