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Open Hour Agendas and Notes: 2021 01

Sage the Rage edited this page Jan 25, 2021 · 7 revisions

2021-JAN-21

Agenda

  • General Updates
  • Aluminium Release
  • Docs Working Group Today
  • General Q&A
  • YouTube Video Link

Meeting Notes

General Updates

  • docs.saltproject.io is live​
  • Other URL redirects will go live in February​
  • Virtual Meetup yesterday with Tom Hatch and Suzanne Ambiel is on YouTube
  • Salt Air being revived – launching in February​

Release Updates

  • CVE Release Feb 4th ​
  • Official announcement will be made today via the RSS Security feed​
  • Aluminium Release delayed – March 31

Docs Working Group

  • Today!
  • Thursdays, 2PM US MT / 8PM UTC
    • Weekly rotations between Working Group Zoom calls, and Twitch Docs Clinic streams
  • Twitch SaltStackInc

General Q&A

From IRC written by the amazing Wayne Werner

  • Janae docs.saltproject.io is live
  • other url redirects will go live in Feb
  • virtual meetup with Tom & Suzanne Ambiel is on YouTube (link above)
  • Sage We will be having a CVE release Feb 4th
  • We will be delaying aluminum release to March 31st
  • Official announcement will be made via RSS security feed
  • I'm the last one that wants to delay a release, there was a lot of thought put into the updated release schedule
  • Janae Docs WG today 8PM UTC (some discussion about the calendar and outlook calendar is rubbish - will be updating the link)
  • Derek Docs WG will be discussing Alan Cugler's awesome Salt Guide that we will be migrating (some discussion around some outdated links for old outdated packages)
  • Bryce I'd prefer repo files vs repo RPMs, since they're trivial to update
  • Randy Do we have a timeline for the CAB?
  • Janae We don't have a specific date for that due do several shifts. We're hoping to have a CAB established by the end of Feb
  • if anyone has an interest on being on that board, please reach out
  • Derek link to SEP https://github.com/saltstack/salt-enhancement-proposals/pull/36 SEP 27 Create Community Advisory Board This is the initial SEP about creating a Community Advisory Board.
  • sage I started a channel in Slack for package updates: #salt-package-updates
  • I know barney had interest in starting a security WG but I don't see him on the call
  • I know there's been some interest in a k8s WG, especially from the core team
  • randy I wonder if k8s would be good as part of the cloud WG, since they've been running out of some material to address
  • cody crawford do we still have the Google Calendar link? I was looking for that. (looks like that's maybe falling through the cracks, we'll be updating some things with the links)

2021-JAN-14 Open Hour Agenda

  • General Updates
  • Aluminium Release
  • Docs Clinic Today
  • General Q&A
  • YouTube Video Link
  • PDF of Slides can be found here

2021-JAN-14 Meeting Notes

General Updates

  • New Branding – redirecting to new URLs for docs.saltstack.com --> docs.saltproject.io​
  • Monthly Virtual Meetups starting in February more to come!​
  • Salt Air is being revived: look for communications, links, and updates
  • We are migrating the 2019.x and no-longer-supported OS packages to archive.repo.saltstack.com

Aluminium Release RC Date Changed

  • RC Date changed from Jan 28 to Feb 4 and that changes code freeze Aluminium Release Milestones

Docs Clinic

  • Today!
  • Thursdays, 2PM US MT / 8PM UTC
    • Weekly rotations between Working Group Zoom calls, and Twitch Docs Clinic streams
  • Twitch SaltStackInc

General Q&A

From IRC written by the amazing Wayne Werner

Sage> the outlook calendar is not great

Wayne> not a fan (me either, ew)

Sage> we haven't made a decision where we want to move it, I only want to move it once but more to come about that if you have any feedback, please let me know

Janae> Yeah, things that should just be small fixes are uh... bigger. Your feedback about that pain is being heard. we need a good calendar

Sage> absolutely... and that one is not

Janae> we're going to be revamping Salt Air, the YouTube channel. I'll be hosting, Tom will be on that, we'll have a lot of the core team guesting on that We'll be getting more Salt project focused social media accounts

Sage> Yeah in the past they've been really focused more on the enterprise project, so this should be a good thing! On SEPs, I know that Barney is looking for starting a security WG, that's something that we need to start up.

Barney> With the Salt project rebrand, is the GitHub org going to change?

Sage> No - not that we know of

Barney> Re: VMware merge of SSE into vRA, are there any thoughts out there about open sourcing any SSE pieces?

Sage> Will be meeting today, hopefully we will have some stuff to talk about over the next month

Andrew> When I go to repo.saltstack.com there's a series of steps, is there a way to provide prebuilt packages?specifically air-gapped installs

Bryce> you can mirror the repo - there are instructions for how to mirror those

Megan> tiamat is another option to build Salt, and then you can just distribute those

https://gitlab.com/saltstack/open/salt-pkg/

that's how we're building Salt using tiamat

Andrew> beacons.save doesn't persist - is that going into Aluminum?

Gareth> There's a PR open for that, slated to go in for Aluminium

Gary> Paid Salt employees seem to be taken off some of the WG meetings - is that just a larger trend, or just optimizing resources to the WGs that are getting a lot of traction?

Sage> definitely the latter

Gary> What is the future for Salt Cloud? With vRA absorbing SSE, which has a lot of those parallel features, will Salt Cloud die?

Sage> I don't think that it will be EOLed, as far as I understand it will continue to be supported

Janae> I know Tyler is still contributing to it

Sage> I can take that back and make sure that my understanding is correct

Andrew> What will become of the training/cert programs for Salt Open?

Sage> AFAIK it's just continuing, but I'll make sure to follow up to make sure that is. they've been full classes

Kirill> can get some more info on the SSE EOL?

utahdave> (Dave Boucha) I think the email was a little miscommunicated...

  • SSE will be vRealize Standard Plus - You can still get what is called SSE today, just rebranded (renamed)
  • vRealize customers will be able to get SSE functionality included
  • If you're a current customer you'll do it under the VMWare name, not SaltStack, that's the only difference
  • If you're a current customer, contracts will be supported, etc.
  • If you have other questions, please reach out

(lots of good discussion about SaltStack the community + VMware)

Sage> yeah, our meetup next week will be all about that as well (I guess it's next wednesday, not tuesday)

2021-JAN-07 Open Hour Agenda

  • General Updates
  • Docs Working Group
  • Salt Lifecycle Enforcement
  • General Q&A
  • YouTube Video Link
  • PDF of Slides can be found here

2021-JAN-07 Meeting Notes

General Updates

  • New branding and more communication coming January. Look for these on social media, mailing lists, here, etc.
  • Virtual Meetups every month, US time and EU time - more details will be communicated
  • Salt Air is being revived: look for communications, links, and updates
  • We are migrating the 2019.x and no-longer-supported OS packages to archive.repo.saltstack.com

Docs Working Group

  • Today!
  • Thursdays, 2PM US MT / 8PM UTC
    • Weekly rotations between Working Group Zoom calls, and Twitch Docs Clinic streams
  • Calendar links HTML Link / ICS Link

Salt Lifecycle Enforcement

After 2021-JAN-19, all unsupported 2019.2.x packages, and End-of-Life Operating Systems (including Debian 8, Ubuntu 14.04, Amazon Linux 1, and CentOS/RHEL 6) will no longer be available from repo.saltstack.com. These packages are currently available on archive.repo.saltstack.com, which will be their new home from then onward.

As detailed in SEP 22: Move old-releases to a different domain name/URL, unsupported releases will be moved to a separate URL to ensure our end-users are making deliberate decisions to download and use unsupported and possibly vulnerable packages of Salt.

For more information on our support policies, reference the following:

General Q&A

Wayne's PR: Updating the Contributing Guide

It's close! A major, much-needed update to the contributing guide is being done via https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/57645

Memory leak issues in Magnesium: are they resolved?

Changes were reverted in the latest point release for Magnesium to address the memory leak issues. The Aluminium release will not be impacted by this.

DeltaProxy: Can it be open-sourced? It would be incredibly beneficial for network management in situations, and there are community concerns on the future of network device management via salt without the improvements from DeltaProxy. The community chat has also brought up resistance from network teams when it comes to Salt adoption.

Good questions. What is DeltaProxy? Currently, DeltaProxy is an Enterprise-only feature:

Salt can target network devices through Salt proxy minions, which can be used by both enterprise and non-enterprise users of Salt. Proxy minions allow you to control network devices that, for whatever reason, cannot run the standard Salt minion service. Examples include:

  • Network gear that has an API but runs a proprietary operating system
  • Devices with limited CPU or memory
  • Devices that could run a minion but will not for security reasons

A proxy minion acts as an intermediary between the master and the device it represents. The proxy minion runs on the master and then translates commands from the master to the device as needed.

By acting as an intermediary for the actual minion, proxy minions eliminate the need to establish a constant connection from a master to a minion. Proxy minions generally only open a connection to the actual minion when necessary.

Proxy minions also reduce the amount of CPU or memory the minion must spend checking for commands from the master. Proxy minions use the master’s CPU or memory to check for commands. The actual minion only needs to use CPU or memory to run commands when needed.

What's the difference between DeltaProxy and general Salt proxy minions? Normally, you would create a separate instance of a proxy minion for each device that needs to be managed. However, this doesn’t always scale well if you have thousands of devices. Running several thousand proxy minions can require a lot of memory and CPU.

A delta proxy minion can solve this problem: it makes it possible to run one minion that acts as the intermediary between the master and the many network devices it can represent. In this scenario, one device (the delta proxy min-ion on the master) runs several proxies. This configuration boosts performance and improves the overall scalability of the network.

For more information about Salt proxy minions, reference:

We wouldn't want the community to find themselves duplicating the efforts put forth by a feature like DeltaProxy, when it could potentially be open sourced and made accessible to the wider community. We'll be taking the community feedback internally, and see whether contributions can be made upstream to Salt itself. This will depend on the Enterprise product owners at VMware, and the strategic decisions made around DeltaProxy availability.