Comment 1 for bug 1609899

The answer to the mystery is that cloud-init's salt minion module was originally written for salt two years ago when /etc/salt/pki was the path. At some point the changes to /etc/salt/pki/minion, and added an auto migration function. But the auto migration function is wrapped in an if statement that says only run it if the transport is zeromq. The default transport seems to not be zeromq anymore, so the migration no longer runs.

I am going to file a bug with salt, but cloud-init should still be fixed to use the new path. Then it won't depend on the migration.