Saltproject IO

Open Hour and Q&A 2025-JAN-16

by Salt Project Team — Jan 16, 2025

In this open hour, the Salt Project Team gives updates on the current state of our GitHub pipelines, extending support windows, and plans for upcoming releases in the coming months.

Agenda

  • State of Salt Project CI
  • Salt 3006 LTS / Salt 3007 STS support
  • Upcoming Salt 3006 LTS / 3007 STS point releases
  • Salt 3008 LTS release timeline
  • Join our Discord server
  • Q&A

State of Salt Project CI

As a result of the Salt Project AWS account backend deleted in October 2024, the Salt Project CI came to a halt. It was dependent on using autoscaling groups and custom EC2 AMIs to run through our entire test suite. This has meant PRs from the community and the dev team haven’t been able to properly launch CI.

Work has been done to migrate CI tests to be capable of running entirely within systemd-enabled containers, and to reduce spend on MacOS runners by migrating to free-cost runners in public repositories. Anyone with a GitHub account will be able to run tests on their own forks using public containers, as opposed to the old approach that depended on AWS-managed EC2 instances.

Status updates on CI work:

  • Linux: All containers are currently working and able to run tests, at not cost, on free runners. ARM-based Linux runners currently run at a cost, but we are able to still make use of them for the time being. The GitHub roadmap involves making a free teir of ARM-based Linux runners available in Q1/Q2 2025, which we will migrate to once available.
  • MacOS: Most fixes are in place and passing!
  • Windows: Remaining fixes are in progress. These fixes, upon completion, should be the remaining problems to address before having a fully functional CI.

We really appreciate the patience here! The timeline is for CI to be functional within the next week or two.

Many changes have happened as a result of the Broadcom acquisition. A lot of changes happened rather quickly in October without being able to provide longer notice to the Salt Project community. We are actively working to inform the community well in advance about future and ongoing work on Salt Project.

Salt 3006 LTS / Salt 3007 STS support

Upcoming Salt 3006 LTS / 3007 STS point releases

  • Estimated February 2025 for the next point releases of both Salt 3006.x LTS and Salt 3007.x STS
  • These point releases have been dependent on fixes being done to the Salt CI pipelines to ensure tests are passing before cutting the next releases
  • These releases will be the first done with our new release process based on the Salt Project CI evolution, and new packages.broadcom.com repo location

Salt 3008 LTS release timeline

  • Salt 3008 LTS is estimated to have a first major release in April 2025
  • We will have an RC prerelease period sometime beforehand and leading up to the GA release

Join our Discord server

Join our Discord server at: https://discord.gg/J7b7EscrAs

Discord can also help you know about upcoming Salt events, such as Open Hour and working group meetings:

  • If you express interest, Discord will notify you when an event you are interested in is starting.
  • Discord Events mirror the Salt Project Community google calendar
  • Discord Desktop app: Events can be accessed at the very top-left in the Discord server
  • Discord Mobile app: Events can be found by clicking the small calendar icon beneath the Discord Server name

Q&A

Includes questions from the Salt Project Open Hour call, in addition to some questions from the Discord.

Q: What is the confidence of the future of Salt Project continuing forward as a maintained open source project under Broadcom?

  • We have complete confidence that Salt Project will continue forward as open source software maintained by full-time core maintainers employed by Broadcom
  • The functionality of the commercial offering (Tanzu Salt) is powered by the underlying Salt Project open source software it is built upon

Q: When it comes to reduced resources from Broadcom for Salt Project - what level of resources for the saltproject does that mean? AFAIK the team was cut down quite severely, will there be more people working on Salt Project?

  • Short-term - the team is staying as it is
  • VMware by Broadcom, with Tanzu specifically (this is where the Salt team resides at Broadcom), is right now ensuring our spend and repeated revenue are repeatable as they improve internal workflows, compute resources, and allocated spend. This has included ensuring the Salt Project team is maximizing usage of free GitHub provided compute for public/OSS projects that Broadcom maintains
  • Salt Project is heavily working to keep everything as simplistic as possible, with a much smaller team than in the past, to reduce overall maintenance burden
  • The reduction in team members wasn’t just about Salt Project specifically, but was because of employees let go across the entire Tanzu Division throughout 2024
  • We don’t believe we will get to the amount of core developers we’ve had historically from Broadcom, but we do expect future growth
  • Broadcom resources are primarily focused on customer-driven development for Tanzu Salt, and the underlying engine of Salt Project OSS. If you are a Broadcom customer, and have particular issues you’d like highlighted by support at Broadcom, please reach out to Broadcom customer support with details

Q: Will 3007 STS be seeing a new point release in the near future?

  • Yes, see previous details above
  • Salt Project team does recommend that LTS is used in production, and STS is considered Short Term Support (bleeding edge)
  • We will still continue to go with the LTS and STS release model, where STS can be used for testing features that make it in prior to being adopted into LTS
  • Added note: Issue brought up by attendee that is of interest in getting fixed in a future point release - [BUG] salt.utils.event get_event on master receiving missing data (issue is not currently triaged)

Q: In regard to the package repository migration from October 2024: Can versions of Salt rpms be isolated in directories for different versions? At least from a major version perspective?

Q: Salt Project CI - After the final Windows tests are fixed and passing, will CI then be fully functional?

  • Yes. We are also working on getting the release workflow migrated, but this shouldn’t impact PRs from contributors
  • Once the CI is fully functional again, we will notify the community. Contributors with in-progress PRs will need to rebase their branch PRs in order to make use of the fixes applied to CI

Q: Salt Project CI complexity - Are there documentation references for understanding the new CI functionality?

  • The tools and documentation for the contributing experience are still needing to be revisited and rewritten at the moment. There will be cleanup and a revisit to documentation to better understand where things are at in the future

Q: Is there a mirror of the old Salt Project repositories?

Q: Communications from Salt Project have been limited, including not much info announced around the ongoing Salt Project CI issues. Salt Project also hasn’t been uploading videos to the YouTube, etc. Can the communication practices improve?

  • A large drop in the Salt Project communication channels happened after our community manager, Jimmy Chunga, left (see Salt Project Blog: 2024-09-19 - A Letter from Chunga: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish). Since September 2024, we no longer have a community manager and will not for the foreseeable future
  • Communications are now done by the Salt Project team engineers
  • Salt Project’s primary communication has been done via the blog, and shared through channels such as Discord, the salt mailing lists, working group meetings, and open hours. If following other social media accounts for Salt Project, there is potential that communications will no longer come from those accounts in the future (Twitter/X, Instagram, Twitch, LinkedIn, etc.)
  • We are increasing the cadence and details of our communications to the community (blog, discord, mailing lists), and we are leaning into increasing transparency and awareness for the community as the team becomes aware of information (ex. the blog post concerning a potential migration of our documentation via Salt Project Blog: 2024-12-18 - Website and Docs: Looking forward in 2025)
  • The Salt Project YouTube channel has not had new videos posted over the past several months, and it is currently unknown as to when/if we’ll be uploading new videos in the future. The community will be notified if we do start uploading videos to the channel again. The Salt Project team has been leading ongoing internal discussions and process for being able to manage the Salt Project YouTube channel, which is why there hasn’t been an update posted to the channel itself

Q: The Salt Project CI problems - do these problems impact other organizations such as community extensions and formulas?

  • No. The CI used by the formulas and extensions community organizations on GitHub use the GitHub-provided free runners already, and weren’t using the AWS EC2 autoscaling groups that the salt repository was using
  • Though, the October 2024 infrastructure changes would definitely impact the CI of those projects when it comes to the new package.broadcom.com repository location, and the updates given to salt-bootstrap

Q: Just wondering, have you come to a decision on the Salt community maintainers’ program? (https://saltproject.io/blog/community-maintainers-wanted/) A few folks from my team applied though we haven’t heard back yet

  • Jimmy Chunga has since left, who was running the Salt Community Maintainers Program communications. Though, the email PDL is still valid and active: saltproject.pdl@broadcom.com
  • If emails sent to that email address have not had a response, please email again and/or reach out to a member of the Salt Team on the community Discord
  • We are still looking for collaboration and shared maintainership
  • What this would look like: permissions given to community maintainers are Triage level permissions, in order to assist with reviewing and assigning issues, while the core maintainers are the ones ultimately merging in PRs

Q: Is The Hacks podcast continuing?

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