Why You Should Be Using Aegir
Why should you be using Aegir? There are many reasons, but the conclusion of a presentation in 2013 at Amherst University in Amherst, MA, was that, through learning basic Aegir functionality and visualizing how it simplifies tasks, one can see how it can make life easier—life as a developer, as a development team lead, and as a Drupal hosting provider.
Additionally, spreading knowledge and adoption of Aegir helps contribute to the Drupal community. Some of the tasks it facilitates include platform maintenance, security upgrades, site installation, and multisite architecture.
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Hosting Management System (HMS)
Aegir can be thought of as a Hosting Management System (HMS). This "HMS" naming convention hints at the fact that Aegir itself runs on a combination of Drupal core (a CMS/CMF), Drush, and contributed modules. Given that the core of Aegir's user interface models Drupal's and gives easy access to the internal Drush output behind its "tasks," it should be somewhat easier for existing users of Drupal to adopt and extend.
Extensibility
Aegir is also extensible. Some particularly interesting contributed modules include the following:
- http://drupal.org/project/hosting_varnish - Clear the Varnish cache for each Aegir site individually
- http://drupal.org/project/provision_civicrm - Spin up a CiviCRM installation via Aegir
- http://drupal.org/project/provision_boost - Configure a multisite boost architecture for your Drupal platform
- http://drupal.org/project/devshop - Helps you set up a development environment for your Drupal dev shop
- http://drupal.org/project/remote_import - Pulls in a site from one server onto another server
- http://drupal.org/project/provision_newrelic - Allows New Relic to distinguish among all of your individual sites for its performance metrics/benchmarking
- http://drupal.org/project/hosting_solr - Create new Solr cores on a per-site basis
Presented at Drupal Camp Western Mass 2013
You can view the Drupal Camp presentation here, although the live presentation included a lot more live demos and visuals of the Aegir UI, including a video of how to automatically install Aegir via apt-get on a fresh Linode server.
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