Development Seed

The Aegir development team has just released our latest piece of tech out onto the world. Aegir 0.4 Alpha 6 is the first major step in a series of milestones reaching toward the goals we have for 0.4. The biggest change in this release is that Aegir now supports multi-server use. You can now see a listing of all the servers that your Aegir site has access to provision sites on, letting you more easily configure your environment correctly.

In previous releases of Aegir, there were two separate node types that represented database servers and web servers respectively. We discovered pretty early on that this was problematic when trying to represent the real network topology we wanted to manage. If you had two web servers that each had a database server installed, we were required to share the single localhost database node between them, and even then this only worked if the two database servers were configured in EXACTLY the same way.

The major change in this release is that we've created a single new node type - named "server". We've then abstracted each of the previous servers or daemons into a new layer called "services". Each conceptual server node may have multiple services it provides (such as mysql or apache).

To install a new site you need to satisfy the service requirements, such as needing a place to store your data. Any server can now provide that for you, including the same server that the files are being served from.

Additionally, the new Services API that allows for this has been built in an object oriented manner to allow developers to implement their own services. With this we can provide postgresql or nginx support simply by overriding some classes and providing alternate implementations of some functions. This new architecture could even be used for more advanced cases, such as mapping virtual servers. You should be able to write a db service that exposes a collection of mysql servers as a cluster, that will then allow you to automate the installation of your site on a db cluster or web cluster by properly mapping the relationships between them.

Another key feature these changes have opened up is integrating Aegir with cloud computing. In the future simply creating a 'server' node will provision the virtual server for you on Amazon ec2 or any of the other systems that libcloud supports.

This release also includes improvements on the platform management front. Aegir now allows you to manage which clients have access to which platforms during site creation, and allows you to lock platforms from having new sites created on them. Once you have migrated all of your sites to a different platform, you can also delete the old platforms, ensuring that you don't have any unnecessary code hanging around on your system.

These are certainly interesting times, but we aren't going to rest on our laurels yet. Our ongoing goal is to provide incremental releases that are usable in production environments, and the Aegir 0.4 alpha 6 release is an example of this. Now that we've stabilized the results of this sprint, we'll continue to work on our roadmap by rewriting a large part of the provision backend to take advantage of our new architecture.