Can saltstack's peer communication channel be used to run salt-cloud commands?

Question

Can saltstack's peer communication channel be used to run salt-cloud commands?

I see there is a peer_run option

Configuration to allow minions to execute runners from the master is done via the peer_run option on the master. The peer_run configuration follows the same logic as the peer option. The only difference is that access is granted to runner modules.

Runners are described as

Salt runners are convenience applications executed with the salt-run command.

Salt runners work similar to salt modules however they execute on the Salt master itself instead of each individual Salt minion.

A Salt runner can be a simple client call, or a complex application.

The use for a Salt runner is to build a frontend hook for running sets of commands via Salt or creating special formatted output.

So it struck me that salt-cloud might be one of the applications I could run. However the list of existing salt-runners doesn't seemed to include salt-cloud. Am I missing anything or is there an easy way to make this work.

Answer 1

A runner is really just a python file that is executed on the Salt Master. You could definitely do Salt Cloud actions from a runner. I've built some custom runners that use Salt Cloud.