You are reading our blog series: Aegir5 Roadmapping
Aegir5 development is happening! We (Consensus) have been making steady progress on it over the last few years and are looking to kick off a new burst of focused development. Here’s a summary of progress that has been made so far and how you can contribute.
First off, as you’re probably aware, Aegir5 is a complete re-write of Aegir. We are intending to build on all the great aspects of Aegir, while freeing ourselves from a codebase that is rooted in PHP 4. We’re using D9+ alongside modern middleware and back-end components.
The front-end (Drupal) and the queue system (based on Celery) are working fairly well. We’ve mostly reproduced the Aegir 3 behaviour, and it has a similar look and feel. This is the most recent work that’s been done directly in the Aegir5 repo, and dates back about a year, or more. (See for example aegir#94.) It’s suffering from some bitrot, so we’ll need to do a bit of cleanup.
Bear in mind that we’re self-funding this project, so we aren’t currently able to dedicate much time and budget to it directly. However, we have had a number of contracts, both current and in the recent past, where we’ve been able to evolve some of the middleware and back-end components.
Rugged Works!
For example, we recently worked with the Drupal Association to build Rugged, a TUF server implementation to secure the Drupal Composer repository. The Drupal Infrastructure team is in the process of beta testing this functionality on drupal.org, and is very much in line with the Aegir project’s goals of making updates easy and secure.
More directly related to Aegir5, Rugged uses Celery extensively, and started out building from the components we’re using in Aegir5. We’ve developed them much further within the context of that project, and plan to port those improvements back to Aegir5.
Enter Kubernetes
Likewise, our initial plan was to build the Aegir5 back-end using Ansible. While we have some basic playbook elements in Aegir5 currently, we’ve had a number of clients recently ask us to build fully automated Kubernetes-based hosting systems. Our first prototype is hosting a Django/React app, and is working well in production.
We’ve been hosting our Kubernetes clusters on OpenStack, since we’ve been striving for a fully FLOSS stack as part of our overall goals for Aegir5. However, a number of our larger institutional clients are restricted to using one of the major cloud vendors. So we’ve been architecting our automation to support any Kubernetes cluster.
We’re currently refining these components for a Drupal upgrade project for a department of the Government of Canada. The Drupal-on-Kubernetes piece was mostly completed a couple weeks ago. We’re continuing to enhance and stabilize it. Next, we’re planning to integrate something along those lines as the default back-end for Aegir5.
Roadmapping Challenge
We do not have a timeline for the integration of these components into Aegir5, mostly due to the aforementioned time/budget constraints. However, we are eager to proceed with that work.
We have had a handful of organizations express interest in possibly funding some of this upcoming work, some of whom are currently hosting several hundred Drupal sites each on Aegir 3.
If you know of someone who might be interested in helping to fund this work, please let us know.
We’re undertaking to update the Aegir5 roadmap to reflect the progress we’ve made, and to outline next steps. Ideally we’ll be able to get a detailed enough break-down to be able to broadly estimate remaining effort for an alpha release.
Hopefully this gives a good picture of the current state of Aegir5 development. We’ll be publishing some subsequent posts in the coming days to describe in more detail our Drupal-on-Kubernetes architecture, as well as how we aim to integrate the existing frontend and queue system work to achieve an MVP Aegir5.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Aside from our Contact form, you can find us on LinkedIn or Matrix, and always eager to talk about Aegir!
The article Aegir5 Development is Happening! first appeared on the Consensus Enterprises blog.
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