aegir

I remember five years ago trying to explain the Bryght / Hostmaster (I worked with Adrian at Bryght on Hostmaster billing and testing and making things work on production!) vision of building your own network of Drupal websites at the push of a button at many Drupal gatherings. All Drupal sites working together, easily updatable and working in your own cloud (or Bryght's cloud if you wanted to pay Bryght). People thought I was crazy :-). Only a few folks like Ethan Kaplan of Warner Brothers Records  and Jonathan Lambert of WorkHabit (and others who I have forgotten, forgive me) got it.

Now in 2010 with Aegir coming to fruition and multiple commodity clouds from build-your-own to using others' like Amazon's cloud and RackSpace's cloud, it's finally making sense to many many people (e.g Emma Jane Hogbin's vision of a cloud for every town)

Thanks to Adrian for continuing to implement the vision! Thanks to Adrian's collaborators and funders over the years: Koumbit, Raincity Studios, Chapter Three, the list goes on and on. Thanks especially those who continue to fund Adrian (go Development Seed and others go!) and the team of Aegir open source implementors, documenters and testers. The reality of open source is that code doesn't get written, documented or tested if there's no funding for it directly or indirectly.

Go Aegir go!

[This post was prompted by Adrian's Tweet:]

QUOTE

i just deleted the last remnants of hostmaster 1 and the work from my bryght / rcs days off my drive. The End.

 

END QUOTE

 

More shaky backlight video from the fantastic combo of the E75, Qik and 3.5G. this time mobile and web related pontifications from Boris Mann of Bootup Labs (and fellow co-founder of Bryght). Check out the video after the jump or read my stream of consciousness pseudo-transcript :-) !

1. Please port Maemo to Qik, and Nokia please buy Qik; just like Nokia should have bought ShoZu :-)
2. Miss604's Denial of Service of Attack
3. Bryght - the first hosted Drupal, first Drupal as a service, 5 years ago
4. Bryght partnership with Workhabit - 50 servers, Cisco routers, pre cloud, we had DOS attacks and Workhabit's awesome Gary, Aaron and Jonathan fixed the routers
5. DOS cannot be fixed completely but it can be minimized through various means including taking out the DOS IP addresses at the router level, taking your site down is not a solution, shows that real hosting companies need to own their infrastructure or have DNS separated
6. Drupal Gardens aka "Bryght done right" aka "Bryght in the cloud is not using Aegir
7. But Drupal Gardens does use Drush
8. Bryght didn't use Drush, we used python for lots of historical reasons To upgrade 1000 Drupal sites e.g. from Drupal 5.1 to Drupal 5.2 sites I ran hmupdate.py (or was it hmupgrade.py? it's fuzzy now!) in a for loop over the 1000 Bryght Drupal web sites
9. Aegir has commoditized Bryght (former Bryght guy, Adrian Rossouw, developed Aegir; Adrian rocks)
10. The entire Bryght Drupal as a service is available in a box i.e. commoditized
11. The awesome Emma Jane Hogbin has advocated a web infrastructure e.g. a Drupal cloud for every town
12. A Drupal cloud for every town is a way to attract businesses because you can spin up a free (government pays for it, far better than bogus tax breaks) scalable, modern, SEO optimised website for a business or non profit in 5 minutes
13. Dreamweaver doesn't cut it - Technologists have failed because there is still no Dreamweaver for 21st century but wordpress.com is close and Acquia Gardens when it's 1.0 will be even closer
14. Does Qik have a business model? Yes bundling with handset
15. Schmap is annoying and irrelevant
16. Iphone 4.0 is highly relevant :-)
17. Apple Gaming network is huge - Could Tiny Speck use it for Glitch? Yes! How porous will Apple make it? i.e. will it play nice with other social networking sites? probably not in the near term but maybe in the long term
18. iAds - based on HTML5! Big ! Will make HTML5 "the voice of the new web dev generation"
19. Multi-tasking - it doesn't matter, it comes down to UX; area where Nokia is lost (except possibly Maemo! go Maemo go! p.s. I hate the name Meego much prefer Maemo!)
20. User Experience of multi-tasking is what's important and having to install a 3rd party task manager to make Symbian multi-tasking work is a really, really bad user experience
21. Yet another shout-out to Jan Ole Suhr for the awesome Gravity Twitter App - best mobile Twitter app on ony platform, only available on Symbian for the moment
22. Took Boris "83 clicks" to pay for Gravity, sad but true :-) ! Nokia, please fix!
23. Maemo potential is so much greater than Apple iPhone and Symbian because it's Linux and because it's truly open from the get go rather than openness being bolted on like Symbian :-) !

Shaky pontifications without borders video

May 15, 2009 was my last day of work for Raincity Studios and with it of course my involvement with Bryght ended as well. It's been a great ride! Thanks to all the Bryght Gals, Guys, customers, investors, friends and of course the folks at Raincity Studios. I am certain that the "Bryght Children" will in their own way (in a small "Fairchild children" way, haha!)  continue to make their mark  (e.g. Rilli, Bootup Labs, and I predict many many more). My next post will be about my new job but for now a few random thoughts and reflections (apologies to the great people I have omitted!):

• I'll never forget moving day into the first Bryght offices at 525 Seymour with the folks at EQO (also gone).
• Bryght Light developed by Adrian and the rest of the Bryght team was and is a Drupal milestone. I can't to see what the fine folks at Lullabot and Acquia  and WorkHabit and the other fine folks doing Drupal hosting come up with. Not to mention what happens with Development Seed, Adrian and  the other folks developing Aegir. Aegir definitely ups the proverbial Drupal hosting 'ante'.
• Speaking of WorkHabit, I will always be impressed by their VPS hosting partnership with Bryght. As far as I know Bryght VPS was the only Drupal-centric VPS hosting from a Canadian company, one of the few in the world and probably the first. Nobody did it better. Thanks to Richard, Gary of WorkHabit, incredible system engineers and sysadmins: Narayan Newton and Ben Holt. Learned some great lessons:i.e. always iterate, automate and listen to the market!

Herewith some random Bryght photos to end it off in a visual style! Ciao Tschüß!