SaltStack team ships release, parties like it…3000

SaltStack team ships release, parties like it…3000

SaltStack has pushed out the latest version of its automation platform with a stack of new features and a new naming convention.

The previous date-based naming convention – eg 2019.2.1 – has been junked in favour of a “non-date based version schema beginning at 3000”. The company added “The version will be MAJOR.PATCH. For a planned release containing features and/or bug fixes the MAJOR version will be incremented.” Just for clarity, 3000 was previously codenamed Neon.

With a name like 3000 you’d expect a lot of changes, and the company said the new release “includes 493 merged pull requests with 141 pull requests ported to master” with “several fixes and planned deprecations” also taken care of.

SaltStack highlighted LGPO module fixes, which it said will “improve LGPO speed on Windows, provide additional support for .NET, create more efficient caching, and implement shorter policy names.”

It also announced the “vendoring” of Python framework Tornado 4.5.3, which it said  “eliminates Salt reliance on a system’s Tornado version and allows Salt support of newer operating systems that don’t have Tornado <5.0 support.”

Other enhancements include support for saltenv environments, and the ability to associate tests with states by naming convention.

There is a new state and execution module for managing Java Keystore, which “allows for adding/removing/listing as well as managing keystore files”. A state and execution module for editing XML files has been added, enabling the editing of values from an xpath query, or editing XML IDs.

The release notes kicked off with the warning that “For historical reasons, Salt requires PyCrypto as a ‘lowest common denominator’. However, PyCrypto is unmaintained and best practice is to manually upgrade to use a more maintained library such as PyCryptodome.”

The team also added,” running Salt with Python 3.8 is currently not supported. It is recommended to not use a version higher than 3.7.”

A stack of deprecations includes the removal of the Hipchat module, which makes sense given Atlassian pulled the plug on the chat platform back in 2018. The new release also sees the removal of “All of the functions in salt.utils.__init__.py”.