You are reading our blog series: Aegir5 Roadmapping
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.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get selected at Pitch-burgh, and then summer vacation came, things got busy, and the project slid to the backburner (again). Fortunately, our efforts to be more public about our work on this project seem to have attracted some attention. We’ve already heard from a number of folks who are interested in using Aegir 5, wanting to know when it’ll be ready, and offering to help in various ways.
Community support
We’re very grateful to have several offers of help with development/testing or funding. However, we haven’t been in a good position to accept support, as we haven’t documented what needed doing in enough detail, nor how much it would cost.
We still needed a roadmap, and we recognized that our previous work on this had been overly focused on technical details and not enough on user-facing value.
With that in mind, we’ve initiated a new planning & estimation mini-project, to describe and estimate a core set of User Stories for Aegir 5. In a couple weeks, we will be sharing the outcomes of this process publicly, and seeking feedback (RFC style) in our gitlab issues. This feedback will help to understand the importance and value of the variety of features Aegir 5 might need from a broader perspective. We can use this to prioritize groups of User Stories into a Release plan, and thus derive an overall estimate of effort and cost.
This should better enable us to receive help, either by funding development or incorporating outside contributions. We aim to (re)build a developer community and Aegir 5 ecosystem, and to empower the formidable Drupal community to leverage this toolkit to its own ends.
Community concerns
Along with the offers of support, we’ve also heard a variety of concerns about the future of the Aegir system or Aegir 5 in particular. For example:
- Can Aegir 3 support Drupal 10?
- Will there be a migration path from Aegir 3 to Aegir 5?
- Does Aegir 5 support multi-site environments?
- Can Aegir 5 satisfy a SaaS use-case?
The first 2 of these we can answer directly:
- No. Fundamental divergence between PHP8, D10, and Drush make this effectively impossible.
- Yes! Onboarding Aegir 3 sites to Aegir 5 is a key use-case on our radar.
Questions 3 and 4 warrant more detailed answers, which we plan to post about shortly, but the short answers are “sort of” and “most definitely” respectively. The Aegir 5 architecture in general is a lot more flexible, intended to enable use-case-specific pluggability.
Community communications
We recognize a growing sense of urgency for Aegir 3 users facing the imminent D7 EOL to find a new home, and we’ve set aside some time for our team to spearhead a collective effort to make Aegir 5 a viable solution. Our plan is to concentrate on enabling contributions to that collective effort by a variety of means (these blog posts, improved docs, transparent dev workflows, etc).
Stay tuned here for upcoming posts mentioned above, as well as announcements and calls for feedback. We expect to be looking for input on a first set of User Stories in a week or two, and again when we publish a release plan shortly thereafter.
If you have questions, comments, or want to get involved, feel free to drop into our public Matrix channel and say hi!
The article Aegir5 Roadmap Update: Planning & Estimation first appeared on the Consensus Enterprises blog.
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