Aegir5 Stewardship: Releasing Aegir back into the wild

2 minute read Published: Author: Derek Laventure

Relaunching the Aegir Dispatch We are pleased to announce we’ve posted the first Aegir Dispatch on Aegir5 to relaunch the community site! As mentioned in the post, we have continued evolving our list of high-level User Stories describing the critical functionality required to plan a series of Releases. We are continuing to break down these stories into a series of Request For Comment (RFC) Release Epics. This is work in progress, but we are eager to hear any feedback you may have :)

Aegir5 Roadmap Update: Planning & Estimation

3 minute read Published: Author: Derek Laventure

The Road(map) so far Back in June, we submitted a Pitch-burgh pitch to seek funding to finally get Aegir 5 fully off the ground. Prior to that, we had been working to build a roadmap to push our prototype implementation up to feature parity and an initial release for broader community participation. In parallel to that, we’d been publishing this series of posts with the goal of culminating in a roadmap and action plan.

Building the Future of Drupal Hosting with Aegir5

4 minute read Published: Author: Derek Laventure

Who We Are Consensus Enterprises is not your average technology company. We are a collective of workers who are driven by optimism, equity, and a shared passion for open-source technologies. Our mission is to build a company that doesn’t just benefit a select few, but instead shares the rewards of our collective hard work. Having contributed to the Drupal community and others for over 20 years, open-source technology is deeply ingrained in our DNA.

Aegir5: Feature parity between Aegir3 and Aegir5

5 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

In previous posts, we’ve covered our Kubernetes framework for an alternative back-end to Aegir5, as well as the front-end Tasks and Operations and Clusters, Projects, Releases, and Environments. We also discussed the Queue architecture that ties the front- and back-ends together. This time, let’s consider the planned feature parity between Aegir 3 and Aegir 5. Clusters, Projects, Releases, and Environments In Aegir3, Servers only have a “verify” task. This ensures that the front end can connect to the server over SSH.

Aegir5 + Pitch-burgh

5 minute read Published: Author: Derek Laventure

See our recent Aegir5 Roadmapping series for more background! Recently, Dries announced an exciting event at the upcoming DrupalCon Pittsburgh: Shark Tank meets Drupal: pitch your best innovation ideas/): Announcing “Pitch-burgh”, an innovation contest at DrupalCon Pittsburgh, where members of the Drupal community can pitch their ideas to receive funding. […] The entrepreneurs give short 2-3 minute presentations in the hopes of securing funding for their idea. Since we’re actively pursuing partners and funding for Aegir5 development, this seemed like it could be a good opportunity.

Aegir5: Kubernetes Backend integration

2 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

In previous posts we covered how the Frontend and queue mechanisms can talk with the Backend. We also covered the stand-alone work we’ve been doing within Drumkit to support Drupal on Kubernetes. In this post, we’ll discuss how we plan to integrate this new Backend into the existing Aegir 5 architecture. To integrate the Kubernetes Backend into Aegir 5, we will need to build new top-level entities (see this earlier post about Clusters, Projects, Releases, and Environments) for the Frontend.

Aegir5: Queue Architecture

3 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

Previously in this series, we looked at the Aegir5 front-end interface architecture, as well as the lower level entities, Tasks and Operations that provide building blocks. As mentioned in the first part of the series, our most recent work on Aegir5 itself has been reworking the queue system. In this post, we explore this topic in more detail. The Aegir5 queue is implemented using Celery, which is a full-featured Python-based task queue, built atop RabbitMQ.

Aegir5: Front-end UI architecture

3 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

In our previous post, we looked at the Tasks and Operations which form the building blocks for the user interface in Aegir5. Here we’ll look at the additional entities required to support the Kubernetes-based backend framework. It is worth noting that Aegir has always had a tension between Developer and SysAdmin use-cases. We’ll cover this in more depth in a later post. For the moment, we’re focused on the Developer use-case.

Aegir5: Front-end low-level architecture

3 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

In our previous post, we talked about our recent client work building a Kubernetes-based system for hosting web applications. We’ve defined a general framework to support our development and production hosting workflows, and recognized this as a solid basis for an alternate backend to plug in to the existing Aegir5 front-end. Today we’ll take a look at the Drupal architecture underlying that front-end. In Aegir5, the building blocks consist of Task and Operation entities.

Kubernetes backend for Aegir5

4 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

Aegir5 and Kubernetes Lately we’ve been working with clients ranging from large Canadian government departments to small commercial SaaS companies, who have asked us to deploy CMS apps to Kubernetes (K8S) clusters running on Openstack. In spite of our continued feeling that most of the time Kubernetes Won’t Save You, we’ve found it to be surprisingly useful in certain contexts. In fact, we’ve started to think that K8S will prove an extremely valuable backend to plug in to our existing Aegir5 front-end and queue system.