This monday (19th of may 2014), Thomas Hatch was in Paris for dotScale 2014. After presenting SaltStack there (videos will be published at some point), he spent the evening with members of the French SaltStack community during a meetup set up by Logilab at IRILL.
Here is a list of what we talked about :
- Since Salt seems to have pushed ZMQ to its limits, SaltStack has been working on RAET (Reliable Asynchronous Event Transport Protocol ), a transport layer based on UDP and elliptic curve cryptography (Dan Berstein's CURVE-255-19) that works more like a stack than a socket and has reliability built in. RAET will be released as an optionnal beta feature in the next Salt release.
- Folks from Dailymotion bumped into a bug that seems related to high latency networks and the auth_timeout. Updating to the very latest release should fix the issue.
- Thomas told us about how a dedicated team at SaltStack handles pull requests and another team works on triaging github issues to input them into their internal SCRUM process. There are a lot of duplicate issues and old inactive issues that need attention and clutter the issue tracker. Help will be welcome.
- Continuous integration is based on Jenkins and spins up VMs to test pull request. There is work in progress to test multiple clouds, various latencies and loads.
- For the Docker integration, salt now keeps track of forwarded ports and relevant information about the containers.
- salt-virt bumped into problems with chroots and timeouts due to ZMQ.
- Multi-master: the problem lies with syncronisation of data which is sent to minions but also the data that is sent to the masters. Possible solutions to be explored are : the use of gitfs, there is no built-in solution for keys (salt-key has to be run on all masters), mine.send should send the data at both masters, for the jobs cache: one could use an external returner.
- Thomas talked briefly about ioflo which should bring queuing, data hierarchy and data pub-sub to Salt.
- About the rolling release question: versions in Salt are definitely not git snapshots, things get backported into previous versions. No clear definition yet of length of LTS versions.
- salt-cloud and libcloud : in the next release, libcloud will not be a hard dependency. Some clouds didn't work in libcloud (for example AWS), so these providers got implemented directly in salt-cloud or by using third-party libraries (eg. python-boto).
- Documentation: a sprint is planned next week. Reference documentation will not be completly revamped, but tutorial content will be added.
Boris Feld showed a demo of vagrant images orchestrated by salt and a web UI to monitor a salt install.
Thanks again to Thomas Hatch for coming and meeting up with (part of) the community here in France.