Salt 0.11.0 Release Notes¶

OverState¶

The overstate system is a simple way to manage rolling state executions across many minions. The overstate allows for a state to depend on the successful completion of another state.

Reactor System¶

The new reactor system allows for a reactive logic engine to be created which can respond to events within a salted environment. The reactor system uses sls files to match events fired on the master with actions, enabling Salt to react to problems in an infrastructure.

Your load-balanced group of webservers is under extra load? Spin up a new VM and add it to the group. Your fileserver is filling up? Send a notification to your sysadmin on call. The possibilities are endless!

Module Context¶

A new component has been added to the module loader system. The module context is a data structure that can hold objects for a given scope within the module.

This allows for components that are initialized to be stored in a persistent context which can greatly speed up ongoing connections. Right now the best example can be found in the cp execution module.

Multiple Package Management¶

A long desired feature has been added to package management. By definition Salt States have always installed packages one at a time. On most platforms this is not the fastest way to install packages. Erik Johnson, aka terminalmage, has modified the package modules for many providers and added new capabilities to install groups of packages. These package groups can be defined as a list of packages available in repository servers:

python_pkgs:
  pkg.installed:
    - pkgs:
      - python-mako
      - whoosh
      - python-git

or specify based on the location of specific packages:

python_pkgs:
  pkg.installed:
    - sources:
      - python-mako: http://some-rpms.org/python-mako.rpm
      - whoosh: salt://whoosh/whoosh.rpm
      - python-git: ftp://companyserver.net/python-git.rpm

Search System¶

The bones to the search system have been added. This is a very basic interface that allows for search backends to be added as search modules. The first supported search module is the whoosh search backend. Right now only the basic paths for the search system are in place, making this very experimental. Further development will involve improving the search routines and index routines for whoosh and other search backends.

The search system has been made to allow for searching through all of the state and pillar files, configuration files and all return data from minion executions.