Saltproject IO

Open Hour 2024-JUN-20

Jun 20, 2024

Open Hour 2024-JUN-20

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

In this open hour, Nick Aronne talks about the recent news that Bitnami added the Salt minion into Bitnami images available in the Bitnami Application Catalog.

Agenda

  • General updates and announcements
  • Join our Discord server
  • Versions going EOL
  • Thank you
  • Salt Project Community Core Maintainers
  • Bitnami’s game changing Salt innovation
  • Q&A plus discussion

General updates and announcements

  • Open Hours are held every 3rd Thursday from 10a.m. to 11a.m. Pacific.
  • Our next Open Hour will be July 18.
  • Join a Salt Project working group!

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

Versions going EOL

At the end of the month, the following operating systems are entering EOL and Salt Project will no longer support these systems with bug fixes:

  • Debian 10
  • RHEL 7

Thank you to exiting team members

Salt Project core team and community are extremely grateful for the work of these departing core team members:

  • Pedro Algarvio
  • Thomas Phipps

Salt Project Community Core Maintainers

Salt Project is taking steps to secure the future and strength of Salt. To that end, we’re starting a new program that will invite select community members to work directly with the Salt Core Team as a core maintainer of Salt. These maintainers will also attend one stand-up per week with the Salt Core Team. You’ll get mentorship, training, and you might even have some fun along the way.

From the time that we first announced the new program a month ago, Melissa Strong joined the Community Core Maintainers. Congratulations to Melissa Strong!

If you’re interested in becoming a Community Core Maintainer, contact Chunga on Discord.

Bitnami’s game changing Salt innovation

Moving the enterprise version of Salt into Tanzu division at Broadcom has brought some nice benefits. One of those benefits has been that we are more integrated into other open source projects in the division. As a result of some of those collaborations, Nicholas Aronne is happy to announce that Bitnami embedded the Salt Minion into Bitnami images available in the Bitnami Application Catalog. From a recent blog entry about the change:

Quietly, and without too much fanfare until now, Bitnami have embedded the Salt Minion into every single OVA and cloud image in the Bitnami Application Catalog. It’s deactivated by default so it has to be enabled to be used and should be pointed at a Salt Master, but you don’t have to install it yourself! Instructions for how to complete these simple activation steps can be found in the Bitnami documentation. …

Now you can more easily use Salt to manage images deployed from the Bitnami Application Catalog alongside any other workloads and devices in your IT estate, all with open-source software (OSS).

The goal is that it will be low effort to enable Salt and get up and running with it easily. It will also make it easier for enterprise users to quickly enable Salt and start using it, which is great for general adoption of Salt.

Check out the blog for more details: Elevating Enterprise Compliance: Bitnami’s Game-Changing Salt Integration Unveiled.

Q&A plus discussion

Q: What is the future for Heist?

  • A: We unfortunately do not currently have the staff to dedicate to improving Heist. We’re not abandoning it, but we’re not actively working on it at the moment; we might not prioritize reviewing PRs for Heist. However, there are some community contributors that are actively fixing bugs and improving salt ssh. We’d like to encourage those contributors to start adopting some of Heist’s design principals into salt ssh. Namely, migrating from the thin salt-ssh directory to using our onedir tarballs, which will make salt-ssh work across architectures. If anyone would want start migrating salt-ssh to use the asyncssh library, we’d support them.
  • Heist uses the onedir tarballs and that’s what hasn’t been used by salt-ssh instead.

Q: I’ve been trying to install or set up temporary Salt clusters in AWS to test various wide-ranging changes to our repo. Do you recommend using salt-ssh or a local master with salt call? We want to bootstrap this deployment.

  • A: Thomas used vagrant for generating the master.
  • A: Max says salt-ssh works just fine and the benefit is you can use it later to roll out updates on your Salt master. In the past, I’ve also used fabric and anything can work.
  • A: Vic says you can dump files on disk via cloud-init. So, the initial master config could be done that way.

Q: When we rolled out 3006 on our Salt master, it has Salt master that isn’t running as a root user and that broke our syndics. Are there any recommendations for fixing that? Is syndic a deprecated technology?

  • A: Syndic is not deprecated yet, but we do hope to deprecate it some time in the future. The work that needs to be done to deprecate that was planned for 3008, but we don’t know if that will make it in. However, it should be working in at least 3007. It was fixed in 3007.1.
  • Q: How about for 3006? That’s what we’re using. Is that a known break in 3006?
  • A: It should still be working in 3006, so it might be an issue. Open one and we’ll get it fixed.

Comment: For the projects on hold, it would probably benefit the community to mark the repos and documentation as such to help prevent people from going to deeply into using those projects.

  • A: Agreed!

Comments

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

Open Hour