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.

Aegir5 Development is Happening!

4 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

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.

Moving Terraform State from OpenStack Swift to GitLab

5 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

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.

Setting Deployment Environments' Terraform State Backends with Environment Variables

3 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

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.

Protecting your cloud networks with WireGuard VPN and Ansible

6 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

Why use a VPN? Within cloud computing, there are various types of sites and services not meant for public consumption (e.g. analytics software, databases, log servers, etc.). For security reasons, it’s best to keep these accesssible only via the private network, which is behind the firewall. To provide access to these resources, a virtual private network (VPN) should be used, with network access granted only to trusted individuals within the organization.

Does your Drupal hosting company lack native Composer support?

2 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

Best practices for building Web sites in the Drupal framework (for major versions 8 and above) dictate that codebases should be built with the Composer package manager for PHP. That is, the code repository for any sites relying on it should not contain any upstream code; it should only contain a makefile with instructions for assembing it. However, there are some prominent Drupal hosting companies that don’t support Composer natively. That is, after receiving updates to Composer-controlled Git repositories, they don’t automatically rebuild the codebase, which should result in changes to the deployed code.

Aegir 5 is coming, and not just for Drupal!

2 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

Aegir is the one-and-only FLOSS hosting system for Drupal sites that’s been around for over 10 years, a rock in the community. While Drupal hosting companies have come and gone, Aegir’s always been there for folks who want to host Drupal sites themselves. According to recent data at the time of this writing, there are 567 instances (that we know about). It’s used by organizations worldwide such as the US National Democratic Institute, NASA, and the European Commission.

DrupalCamp Ottawa 2019: Automate All the Things

1 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

On Friday, October 18th, I presented at DrupalCamp Ottawa 2019. That’s the annual gathering of the Drupal community in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Session information: Ever heard of infrastructure-as-code? The idea is basically to use tools like Ansible or Terraform to manage the composition and operation of your cloud systems. This allows infrastructure to be treated just like any other software system. The code can be committed into Git which allows auditability, and reproducibility.