Koumbit sponsors the Aegir 1.0 release

Koumbit, through funding from the Ministère des Services Gouvernementaux, has sponsored the release coordination of the final 1.0 release of Aegir, the main software behind our next-generation AlternD.com shared hosting service.

As one of its founding principles, free software has always been a driving force for our project. In accordance with that principle, we make sure that the software we develop for clients, and that we base our services upon, is shared with the community. This allows us to get help from the community, but also helps everyone to setup services like the ones Koumbit.org provides - so that people are not locked into our services, and we allow the internet to flourish in a decentralised fashion.

This release comes as a turning point for Koumbit as we are about to relaunch our AlternD.com "software as a service" offering based on OpenAtrium and Aegir, in May 2011. Read on for a short description taken from the release notes for version 1.0.

The Aegir team is very pleased to announce the first official stable release of Aegir - 1.0. While it's been a mostly "open secret" that most of our releases are production ready, this one has been tested through no less than 15 alpha releases, 2 beta releases and 7 release candidates, for a grand total 24 test releases before we deliver this stable version.

Speaking of open secrets, here's a word from the Aegir project founder, Adrian Rossouw:

The Aegir 1.0 release marks the end of my association with the Aegir project, as I am officially stepping down as project leader, handing the reins to Antoine, Miguel and the rest of the team.

Nearly 8 years ago, I left my job to help found Bryght, one of the first Drupal service companies, with the intention of building a hosted service with Drupal. I had a dream, and that dream was called "hostmaster". Over the next several years, the system I developed to accomplish this dream evolved into Aegir.

I started the Aegir project, in it's current form, out of a desire to ensure that my dream would be able to survive beyond my ability to dedicate myself to it. The very fact that I am writing this is evidence that it has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Aegir is bigger than just one person, and I am incredibly happy and proud of the progress made, so I feel completely comfortable leaving you in the hands of my very capable co-maintainers.

Thank you to everybody for their support, and I wish nothing but the best for the project and it's future victories!

And thank you, Adrian, for this great project you have given to the Drupal community, it means a lot to us!

Now onto the release. This actual release isn't much different from the previous release candidates - you can see the list of changes from the previous RC7 release at the end of those notes. However, since this is our first major release in a long time, we figured it would be important to outline how things have changed since the old days of 0.3. For those of you who weren't there, back then installing Aegir was hard. There was no "clone", no SSL, no multiserver. You had to migrate sites one at a time and you had to create platforms yourself (no drush make!). We were still using CVS.

With 1.0, we have multiserver support, Debian packages, DNS, we're using git, drush make and we have a very dynamic community of users and shops using the project. We have ambitious goals for 2.0 and we're eager (pun intended) to start moving again! So if you were waiting for Aegir to be stable, easy to install, production-ready, now is the time. The 1.x branch will be well supported as a lot of shops are running it in production already. What are you waiting for?!

Head over to the release notes for install instructions and all the details!