Open Hour 2020-DEC-17
Agenda
- General updates
- Docs Clinic Today
- Existing SEPs
- Discussion and Q&A
Meeting Notes
This is the last Open Hour of the year! We get back to it on January 7th, 2021!
General Updates
- Bugfix releases yesterday!
3001.4
3000.6
2019.2.8
3002.x
release. This is because the fix is already included in3002.2
! - Salt Project branding: Posted in community slack, would love feedback!
- Remaining videos from SaltConf20 are getting posted to YouTube
Docs Clinic Today
Streaming on Twitch: twitch.tv/saltstackinc
- Continuing to address this issue: [BUG] Documented options in minion/master config files don’t match minion/master config documentation, and vice versa
FOSDEM 2021 Online: Call For Participation
There is a Call For Participation (CFP) for the Infrastructure Management DevRoom, with a deadline of December 31st, 2020. We highly encourage people of the Salt community to apply.
Snippet from the site:
The devroom will normally run on Saturday 6 February 2021.
The Infra Management Devroom is a devroom for developers, system engineers, SRE, system administrators and all practitioners of Infrastructure as Code or Infrastructure Management.
We are looking for any topic relating to Infrastructure, including but not limited to Configuration Management, Infrastructure Orchestration, Infrastructure Management, Infrastructure Automation, and Infrastructure Monitoring.
Existing SEPs
All PRs in SEPs repo here: Salt Enhancement Proposals
- On Janae’s radar for January, 2021: SEP 27 – Create Community Advisory Board
Community Feedback/Thoughts on SEPs
- Randy Thompson: Has successfully had a single-binary, built via Tiamat, running as a service in production.
- Potentially related issues in
salt-pkg
:
Question: What is the purpose/mission of the Community Advisory Board?
The purpose/mission of the Community Advisory Board is to give a more formalized voice to the community through regular and revolving representation that the core team can sync with on issues and developments within the community. This will not minimize the voice of those in the community who are not on the board. The board members will be tasked with staying abreast of issues that arise within community slack and other places to filter and highlight those concerns. The responsibilities and purpose will evolve and adjust over time.
For the related SEP discussion: SEP 27 – Create Community Advisory Board
Discussion and Q&A
Work on pepper
Randy Thompson is working on a fork, upgrading pepper
to Python 3.6+
salt-api
rewrite in FastAPI
Randy Thompson is working on a FastAPI implementation/rewrite!
Question: Is there a better alternative to heavy pillar usage for minion configurations?
Are there any plans to make a minion-based configuration system available that can take the load off master-side pillar? The difficulty I keep seeing being talked about is people overusing pillar because there’s no simple alternative.
The huge amount of non-secret data that people put into pillar, because it’s easy to target. But there’s no alternative that can match and merge on the minion. We have to write complex map.jinja for every different use case.
Grains come from the minion, this is config from the master.
Why not give the minion their own pillar_top.sls for example, that simply reads from the fileserver and transparently does it all.
So we’d still need to have map.jinja to merge secrets and non-secrets?
- @baby-gnu from the Formulas Working Group has been working on something similar to this and has a prototype in the openssh-formula. See the documentation for
map.jinja
for merging secrets (from pillars) with non-secrets (from the filesystem):- WIP PR: feat(map): use targeting like syntax for configuration
- WIP Documentation: map.jinja
- SDB should also be looked at as another way of storing and retrieving data.
- Lookups in sdb should be faster than reading from pillars directly anyway since it’s just a datastore.
- Maybe an expansion of SDB’s capabilities is needed if it currently doesn’t support the use case here? An SDB module which reads from a pillar-esque top file could be helpful.
This may require a new SEP, or and expansion/extension of the documentation if existing features may support what’s needed.