Open Hour 2023-SEP-21

Open Hour YouTube playlist | Contact us! saltproject@vmware.com

In this open hour, we announced a new release of Salt and Gareth demoed the new quickstart guide.

Agenda

• General updates and announcements
• Check out Salty Stream #1
• Salt Project “Thing” coming soon
• Demo: New quickstart guide
• Q&A plus discussion

General updates and announcements

• Open Hours are held every 1st and 3rd Thursday from 10a.m. to 11a.m. Pacific.
• Our next Open Hour will be {month date}.
• Join a Salt Project working group!
• 3005.3 and 3006.3 are released!

Check out Salty Stream #1

We’re going to start featuring Salty Streams at least once per quarter.

The first Salty stream happened Tuesday and it was about: “Salt Project: Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We’re Going.” It starred:

• Tom Hatch, creator of Salt and Idem Project
• Nicholas Aronne, Sr. Manager, Product Management, Salt Project

​Check it out:

• On all Salt Project social media profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)​
• It’s also on the Salt Project YouTube channel.

Demo: New quickstart guide

We recently published a new quickstart guide on the Salt Install Guide. The purpose of this guide is to give new users a taste of Salt by giving them a quick path to install and try Salt for the first time.

Gareth and Shane demoed the quickstart script in Open Hour and you can watch the video for the actual demo.

We’d love for you to give us some feedback, keeping a few caveats in mind:

• If you are a seasoned users of Salt, you are not necessarily the target audience, so you might have a different perspective. Nevertheless, we still think your insights will be valuable!
• We’re taking an Agile approach with this content where we hope to make incremental improvements over time. This is just our first version of the quickstart guide and there will be more to come. We wanted to put an initial draft out there so that we could get some initial feedback, but we hope to improve it and make it better over time.

To give us feedback, let us know on the #documentation channel on our Slack workspace. You can also open an issue against the bootstrap repository, which is where the quickstart script is stored.

Q&A plus discussion

Q: I have a Salt execution module that I was thinking of turning into a Salt extension. What’s the current guidance on how to do that?

• A: There was some good guidance on YouTube where Pedro went through the process. The create Salt extension tool is also helpful.

Q: I’m trying to spin up some test clusters in AWS land running both our Salt master config and really basic minions. I’m having a chicken and egg problem. Is it possible to pre-create the key that the master users and minions need?

• A: The wheel module is probably what you want: https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/ref/wheel/all/index.html
• Here’s a tutorial: https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/tutorials/preseed_key.html
• Avoid auto-accepting minions as that is not best practice.

Q: Is there a list of extensions that VMware will own and a list of candidate extensions that we want to pull out into the community?

• A: It’s not publicly available yet, but we hope to share it eventually.

Q: We’re a year into onedir now. Is there any news on ESXI native minions?

• A: There’s been talk about it, but we have nothing to share just yet. It’s still an ongoing discussion.

Comments

Feel free to tell us what you think about Open Hour on the Salt Project Community Slack.