Use the Salt Event System to fire events from the master to the minion and vice-versa.
Fire an event on the local minion event bus. Data must be formed as a dict.
CLI Example:
salt '*' event.fire '{"data":"my event data"}' 'tag'
Fire an event off up to the master server
CLI Example:
salt '*' event.fire_master '{"data":"my event data"}' 'tag'
Current Salt release: 2014.1.6
Docs for previous releases on salt.rtfd.org.