saltstack/salt

=========================
Salt 0.10.0 Release Notes
=========================

:release: 2012-06-16

0.10.0 has arrived! This release comes with MANY bug fixes, and new
capabilities which greatly enhance performance and reliability. This
release is primarily a bug fix release with many new tests and many repaired
bugs. This release also introduces a few new key features which were brought
in primarily to repair bugs and some limitations found in some of the
components of the original architecture.

Major Features
==============

Event System
------------

The Salt Master now comes equipped with a new event system. This event system
has replaced some of the back end of the Salt client and offers the beginning of
a system which will make plugging external applications into Salt. The event
system relies on a local ZeroMQ publish socket and other processes can connect
to this socket and listen for events. The new events can be easily managed via
Salt's event library.

Unprivileged User Updates
-------------------------

Some enhancements have been added to Salt for running as a user other than
root. These new additions should make switching the user that the Salt Master
is running as very painless, simply change the ``user`` option in the master
configuration and restart the master, Salt will take care of all of the
particulars for you.

Peer Runner Execution
---------------------

Salt has long had the peer communication system used to allow minions to send
commands via the salt master. 0.10.0 adds a new capability here, now the
master can be configured to allow for minions to execute Salt runners via
the ``peer_run`` option in the salt master configuration.

YAML Parsing Updates
--------------------

In the past the YAML parser for sls files would return the incorrect numbers
when the file mode was set with a preceding 0. The YAML parser used in Salt
has been modified to no longer convert these number into octal but to keep
them as the correct value so that sls files can be a little cleaner to write.

State Call Data Files
=====================

It was requested that the minion keep a local cache of the most recent executed
state run. This has been added and now with state runs the data is stored in a
msgpack file in the minion's cachedir.

Turning Off the Job Cache
=========================

A new option has been added to the master configuration file. In previous
releases the Salt client would look over the Salt job cache to read in
the minion return data. With the addition of the event system the Salt client
can now watch for events directly from the master worker processes.

This means that the job cache is no longer a hard requirement. Keep in mind
though, that turning off the job cache means that historic job execution data
cannot be retrieved.

Test Updates
============

Minion Swarms Are Faster
------------------------

To continue our efforts with testing Salt's ability to scale the minionswarm
script has been updated. The minionswarm can now start up minions much faster
than it could before and comes with a new feature allowing modules to be
disabled, thus lowering the minion's footprint when making a swarm. These new
updates have allows us to test

.. code-block:: bash

    # python minionswarm.py -m 20 --master salt-master


Many Fixes
==========

To get a good idea for the number of bugfixes this release offers take a look
at the closed tickets for 0.10.0, this is a very substantial update:

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues?milestone=12&state=closed

Master and Minion Stability Fixes
---------------------------------

As Salt deployments grow new ways to break Salt are discovered. 0.10.0 comes
with a number of fixes for the minions and master greatly improving Salt
stability.