The Aegir Hosting System is the only fully free and open source distributed provisioning system for Drupal. It allows you to manage anywhere from a few sites for a single organization, to thousands of sites across as many concurrent instances of Drupal, on as many servers, and for as many clients, as you need. Since it's all built on Drupal and Drush, it can be customized and extended using all the tools we're already familiar with.

At Koumbit Networks, a lead development shop behind the Aegir project, we are developing or already have in place several distinct business models, largely enabled by our Aegir infrastructure and expertise.

For our "classic" web development practice, Aegir provides scalability and flexibility, as well as enabling streamlined development-staging-production workflows. It also allows us to host and maintain hundreds of production sites, including frequent regular updates to our custom platforms. We'll explore both of these solutions to common pain-points that challenge many Drupal dev shops. These tools and workflows work equally well for organizations wanting better automation of internal Drupal sites as well.

For a number of years, Koumbit has been offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services. That is, hosting dedicated VPSs running Aegir systems, mostly for larger consulting clients. This has matured to the point that we now offer dedicated Aegir hosting service, well-suited to smaller development shops: AegirVPS. To enable this, we've built Aegir and Drush Puppet modules to maintain standardized configurations, and ease deployment.This model presents some interesting challenges and benefits, which I'll explore in more detail by presenting a case-study of our recent work in this field.

Finally, we'll touch on how we're leveraging e-commerce integration and other contrib modules, as we spin-off a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model: OpenAtria. This will allow clients to purchase subscriptions to pre-built sites, which are then transparently provisioned and maintained for them by an Aegir system.

About the presenter
Christopher Gervais (ergonlogic on d.o) is a geek and sometimes marketing guy at Koumbit, and lead instigator at OpenAtria. He is also a maintainer of the Aegir Project and several Aegir contrib modules, and tools, such as Aegir-up.

Koumbit Networks (est'd in 2003) has been building high end Drupal projects for almost 10 years, primarily in the non-profit sector, and is leading development in the Aegir Project.