saltstack/salt

==============================
Salt Cloud 0.6.0 Release Notes
==============================

The new Salt project, Salt Cloud, is introduced with version 0.6.0. Salt Cloud
has been developed to ease the automation and integration of Salt with public
cloud providers by allowing cloud vms to be cleanly defined, created, and
automatically hooked back into a Salt Master.

While Salt Cloud is primarily made to build cloud vms to tie into a Salt Mater,
it has been created in a generic way, so that it can be used to provision and
hook systems of any type via the familiar Salt modules system.

This release supports three public cloud providers (all via libcloud),
Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud and Linode.

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-0.6.0.tar.gz

https://cloud.github.com/downloads/saltstack/salt-cloud/salt-cloud-0.6.0.tar.gz

Packages are not yet available, Salt Cloud requires three dependencies, the
salt libs, libcloud, and paramiko.

Extensible With Cloud Modules
=============================

The Salt loader system has been employed to make adding support for additional
public cloud systems just as modular and simple as adding support for new
package managers in Salt.

Adding support for a new cloud provider is extremely simple, just add a cloud
module and everything cleanly links together.

Define VM Profiles
==================

The way a vms is created is done via profiles. Profiles are used to define what
properties a vm will have, the cloud provider, the size and the image.

.. code-block:: yaml

    centos_rackspace:
      provider: rackspace
      image: CentOS 6.2
      size: 1024 server
      os: RHEL6
      minion:
        grains:
            role: webserver
        master: salt.example.com

This profile will be used to create vms on Rackspace cloud with the CentOS 6.2
image and the Rackspace 1024 vm size. Particulars of the minion config can
also be specified.

Individual vms can be created from profiles:

.. code-block:: bash

    # salt-cloud -p centos_rackspace web1

This command creates a vms with the name web1 on the Rackspace cloud and
connects the new vm to a Salt Master located at salt.example.com. The new VM
has the Salt id of web1.

Define Maps of Profiles
=======================

When it is desired to have a predefined mapping of many, or a specific group
of vms then a cloud map can be defined:

.. code-block:: yaml

    centos_rackspace:
      web1
      web2
      web3
      web4
    centos_linode:
      redis1
      riak1
      riak2
      riak3
    ubuntu_ec2:
      dev1
      dev2
      cassandra1
      cassandra2
      cassandra3

This map file will create vms named web 1-4 using the centos_rackspace profile
on rackspace, the redis and riak vms on linode and the dev and Cassandra vms on
ec2. It can be run with salt-cloud:

.. code-block:: bash

    # salt-cloud -m mapfile

When creating more than one vm the -P option can be passed, to make the vms
provision in parallel, greatly speeding up large scale expansions of vms.