Salt 0.6.0 release notes¶

The Salt remote execution manager has reached initial functionality! Salt is a management application which can be used to execute commands on remote sets of servers.

The whole idea behind Salt is to create a system where a group of servers can be remotely controlled from a single master, not only can commands be executed on remote systems, but salt can also be used to gather information about your server environment.

Unlike similar systems, like Func and MCollective, Salt is extremely simple to setup and use, the entire application is contained in a single package, and the master and minion daemons require no running dependencies in the way that Func requires Certmaster and MCollective requires activeMQ.

Salt also manages authentication and encryption. Rather than using SSL for encryption, salt manages encryption on a payload level, so the data sent across the network is encrypted with fast AES encryption, and authentication uses RSA keys. This means that Salt is fast, secure, and very efficient.

Messaging in Salt is executed with ZeroMQ, so the message passing interface is built into salt and does not require an external ZeroMQ server. This also adds speed to Salt since there is no additional bloat on the networking layer, and ZeroMQ has already proven itself as a very fast networking system.

The remote execution in Salt is "Lazy Execution", in that once the command is sent the requesting network connection is closed. This makes it easier to detach the execution from the calling process on the master, it also means that replies are cached, so that information gathered from historic commands can be queried in the future.

Salt also allows users to make execution modules in Python. Writers of these modules should also be pleased to know that they have access to the impressive information gathered from PuppetLabs' Facter application, making Salt module more flexible. In the future I hope to also allow Salt to group servers based on Facter information as well.

All in all Salt is fast, efficient, and clean, can be used from a simple command line client or through an API, uses message queue technology to make network execution extremely fast, and encryption is handled in a very fast and efficient manner. Salt is also VERY easy to use and VERY easy to extend.

You can find the source code for Salt on my GitHub page, I have also set up a few wiki pages explaining how to use and set up Salt. If you are using Arch Linux there is a package available in the Arch Linux AUR.

GitHub page: https://github.com/saltstack/salt

Wiki: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/wiki

Arch Linux Package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/salt-git/

I am very open to contributions, for instance I need packages for more Linux distributions as well as BSD packages and testers.

Give Salt a try, this is the initial release and is not a 1.0 quality release, but it has been working well for me! I am eager to get your feedback!