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.
For our cloud computing, we typically use an OpenStack provider because of its open-source nature: There’s no vendor lock-in, and the IaaS code is peer-reviewed unlike providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. (Shout out to Vexxhost for having great support!) As such, we’ve been using OpenStack’s Swift object storage service for storing Terraform’s state, which allows Terraform to track all of the resources it manages for automating infrastructure.
Recently, however, support for the Swift backend has been removed.
Terraform is an essential tool for automating cloud-computing infrastructure and storing it in code (IaC). While there are several ways to navigate between deployment environments (e.g. Dev, Staging & Prod), I’d like to talk about how this can be done with environment variables, and explain why it can’t be done more naturally with Terraform variables.
Introduction Last week our fully remote team gathered in person at a beautiful spot in Prince Edward County, Ontario, for our second annual company retreat. Our first iteration in 2021 was a resounding success, and we decided to do it again this year. In both cases, we took advantage of the high-bandwidth nature of being together in physical space to hold a variety of big picture conversations about our accomplishments, direction and goals.
Do you REALLY need a unicorn? Or (spoiler alert!!!) would a herd of horses with the necessary skills shared among them actually be a better solution to your problem?
When you set out to build a company that explicitly espouses liberatory politics, and you want to be around for the long haul, you’ve just committed yourself to do some deep soul searching about governance. Fortunately, we found sociocracy, so we had a starting point for all those hard conversations.
Social connection is essential to building trust in a remote workplace. We hold regular video calls for no other purpose than to chat and get to know one another. It makes a huge difference in our work.
