Where's Aegir at DrupalCon Denver?
So, why isn't Aegir at DrupalCon Denver?
I've been asked that question repeatedly over the past couple months, and so I figured I'd write up a little explanation for anyone else that's curious.
In case you don't know what Aegir is (nevermind how it's pronounced), I'll take a minute for a brief intro. The Aegir Project is, to our knowledge, the only fully free and open source Drupal provisioning tool available to the Drupal community. It allows for painless deployments, backups, migrations and updates of a whole network of Drupal sites. Being built exclusively on Drupal and Drush, it can easily be extended by anyone already familiar with the tools and techniques of Drupal development. We have a vibrant community that centers around our IRC channel (#aegir on freenode.net), our community site, and the various d.o issue queues that make up the project. There are also a number of shops offering professional services and hosted solutions (such as Omega8.cc and us at Koumbit).
After DrupalCon Chicago, this is what Dries had to say:
Aegir is an important tool in the toolbox of the Drupal community.
So, first off, it isn't that we didn't want or intend to be present at DrupalCon Denver. Two of Aegir's maintainers, Steven Jones (darthsteven) and Antoine Beaupré (anarcat) submitted sessions, as did I (ergonlogic) and at least one other community member. Koumbit (along with Steven) also submitted a pre-conference training proposal. Unfortunately, none of these were accepted. This came as a bit of a shock to us, as our sessions at DrupalCon London had been very well attended; standing-room only, and overflowing into the hall. The pre-conference training there also received mostly positive reviews.
Without such high-profile events, it was hard to justify our attendance. Most of the maintainers are spread out between the UK, Poland and Australia, and travel to the US can be prohibitively expensive. Koumbit, though based in Montreal, is a non-profit, and members here faced a similar dilemma.
Thankfully, some intrepid community members organized a BoF (thanks notzach & shrop, among others!), which seems to have been well attended and lively.
That said, we intend to re-double our efforts to ensure we have sessions at DrupalCon Munich, and future DrupalCons. Also, we're very active in regional DrupalCamps (Koumbit in the north-east US & Canada, Steven across the UK, etc.), and we can always be found on IRC, the community site or the d.o issue queues. So if you're interested in the project, feel free to reach out to us any time, not just during the big conferences. :)
#1
[ A lost comment by niccolo follows - recovered by omega8cc ]:
at BadCamp this year at Berkeley I proposed a BOF too, it was last minute and one person showed up ! not bad considering the only advertising was through a quiet entry in the BOF schedule (last session on the last day). http://2011.badcamp.net/program/bofs/aegir-ecology-emerging-markets
that one person did say something that I hadn't considered. He told an anecdote about how he was at the Pantheon booth at BadCamp and people where asking if there was a way to host multiple small sites on Pantheon.
I think Aegir is being squeezed by Pantheon and Acquia Dev Cloud out of the community and marketplace. I have no idea how many tracks at Denver are allocated to sponsors, but that's a factor too. Consider the aggressive marketing Acquia Dev Cloud and ongoing outreach that goes on in Pantheon.
Very importantly, Pantheon and Acquia Dev Cloud have a pipeline from local development to staging to live. It reduces the developers pain.
In Aegir, for everyday users, that pipeline is ad hoc, or patchy and where its really happening well, largely tied-up in custom or in-house solutions.
I asked the Local to Production Pipeline question about BO Aegir a while back http://groups.drupal.org/node/160449
and the VirtualBox BOA came-out as a solution for local staging... its an important foundation element in a pipeline or toolchain, but just one element http://groups.drupal.org/node/160449#comment-642763
I also gave a talk at San Francisco DUG on Occupy Drupal, which had VirtualBox BOA (VBOA) http://occupydrupal.org/article/presentation-occupy-drupal-99
I think a lot of folks got interested in Aegir too early, when it didn't work so smoothly, and so winning them back is a priority. Lullabot for instance are(where?) suffering under an ancient, too early Aegir installation. These folks are a high profile Aegir case-study.
I really think this comes down to economics, you've got to pay to belong. Whether its the route of investing more in community outreach, showcase hosting and other projects such as a development to production pipeline. Or whether its buying Google Ads ie Acquia Dev Cloud or sponsoring at the conventions or camps.
I've wondered about having an Aegir centric event ? Aegir Camp ? someone please steal this idea. I would pay for that and its a chance to really dive deep. Could Koumbit organize something ?
Maybe we could use something like Big Blue Button (open source video conferencing) to create a hybrid event for the Aegir diaspora in Australia, Asia and Europe. BBB is easy to set-up, and is really very good. Audio and presentations can be recorded. Live sessions can share documents and desktops, video conferencing is possible, and there are some basic integrations with Drupal. http://www.bigbluebutton.org/ http://drupal.org/project/bbb
Aegir is perfect for Drupalistas hosting lots of small sites built on distribution profiles. That should be most Drupal users. Its not the product, its the marketing and outreach in the marketplace and community.
To paraphrase, "It's The Ecosystem, Stupid!"
#2
[ A lost comment by ergonlogic - recovered by omega8cc ]:
Some insightful comments here, niccolo.
From a marketing and communications stand-point, I think you're correct. I'd say an important reason for this is that both of those have significant venture capital backing, and so can thus afford it. Another is that Aegir is a community project, rather than a product of service, and isn't 'owned' by any particular entity.
From a personal perspective, I believe that as much as we at Koumbit endeavour to lead the project, being a worker's collective, it's not really in our DNA to assert authority over such things. In addition, Aegir has historically been an internal tool that we use in developing and hosting Drupal sites, rather than a service in it's own right. This has meant it gets treated as an expense (rather than a profit-center) and has sometimes made additional investment and expenditures difficult to justify.
This is changing though, as we ramp up our AegirVPS services [1], and some colleagues and I spin-off an Aegir-based SaaS service offering, OpenAtria [2]. With these Aegir-centric services, expect to see more promotion and sponsorship with an Aegir slant in the coming year.
Again, you're correct. However, I think we've seen significant improvement over the past year. Bear in mind that Aegir was, and always has been, a /hosting/ solution. That it's tremendously useful for development is a nice by-product. Also, one of the principles on which the project was founded is: Tools, not policy, and so building in a strict workflow isn't likely something we'll see in Aegir itself.
That said, one of my primary motivations for building Aegir-up [3] has been to provide a standardized local development environment, which can then act as the foundation to build towards more standardized workflows. In fact, I'm working presently on integrating Git and Jenkins servers to allow for that Holy Grail of DevOps, continuous integration.
Beyond that, I think all your suggestions, for events, sponsorship, promotion, &c. are good ideas. The community needs more active engaged members such as yourself. Membership on the community site [4] is inching towards 1000, and Provision [5] appears to have been downloaded over 20,000 times! Out of that, only a small fraction are active participants in the community. So, I'd personally like to ask the community to make more noise, veen if it's just clicking on the ohloh "I use it":
[1] http://www.koumbit.org/en/services/AegirVPS [2] http://www.openatria.com/ [3] http://drupal.org/project/aegir-up [4] http://community.aegirproject.org/ [5] http://drupal.org/project/provision