# Salt Cloud 0.8.1 Release Notes

In a somewhat quicker timeline than usual, Salt Cloud 0.8.1 has been released! While many of the updates in this release focus on stability, users of map files and AWS also have some new features to look forward to.

## Documentation

The documentation for Salt Cloud can be found on Read the Docs: https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.io

## Download

Salt Cloud can be downloaded and install via pypi or github:

https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/salt-cloud/salt-cloud-0.8.1.tar.gz

https://cloud.github.com/downloads/saltstack/salt-cloud/salt-cloud-0.8.1.tar.gz

Some packages have been made available for salt-cloud and more on their way. Packages for Arch, and FreeBSD are being made available thanks to the work of Christer Edwards, and packages for RHEL and Fedora are being created by Clint Savage. Package availability will be announced on the salt mailing list.

## Full Query Option

The -Q or --query option only displays a small amount of information about each virtual machine. This is to keep command-line reports small and manageable. Now the -F or --full-query option can be used to display all of the information about a VM that salt-cloud knows about. The amount of information returned varies between providers, depending on the kinds of functionality available through them.

## Increased Map Functionality

Previously, map files were only used for creating VMs. Now they can also be used to query and delete VMs. The -Q, -F, and -d options can all be used in conjunction with -m, to display map-specific data. If a VM that is specified in the map does not exist, it will still show up under -Q and -F as "Absent". If a VM specified in the map does not exist when a -d is specified, it will of course be ignored.

## Multiple Security Groups in AWS

AWS allows for multiple security groups to be applied to any given VM, but until this release, Salt Cloud only supported managing one. This update allows a list of security groups to be specified. In the main configuration file, an example of multiple security groups would look like:

    AWS.securitygroup:
      - default
      - extra

In a profile, an example would be:

    micro_amazon:
      provider: aws
      image: ami-e565ba8c
      size: Micro Instance
      os: RHEL6
      securitygroup:
          - default
          - extra

## Bug Fixes

A number of bugs have been fixed in this release. Most of these were internal fixes related to authentication and deployment across various providers. Bug fixes in this release include:

Ubuntu users may notice that deploying an instance has become significantly noisier. A change was made to make Ubuntu display information returned as packages are installed, which is more aligned with how yum-based machines already behaved. This also forced these VMs to deploy salt in a much more reliable manner.

Requirements listed in requirements.txt are also pulled into setup.py, to make it easy to use the easy_install tool.

Most cloud providers default to root as the initial user, but AWS typically providers a different user (ec2-user, ubuntu, bitnami, etc). Deployment on such images must be handled using sudo. Previously, sudo was used to issue all deployment commands, but this failed on images where sudo was not installed by default (such as FreeBSD). Now sudo will only be used with non-root logins.