Presented at Drupal Camp Western Mass 2013
Why should you be using Aegir? There are many reasons, but the conclusion of this presentation was that, through learning basic Aegir functionality and visualizing how it simplifies tasks, one can see how it can make life easier -- life as a developer, as a development team lead and as a Drupal hosting provider. Additionally, spreading knowledge and adoption of Aegir helps contribute to the Drupal community. Some of the tasks it facilitates include platform maintenance, security upgrades, site installation and multisite architecture.
Aegir can be thoght of as a Hosting Management System (HMS) -- this "HMS" naming convention hints at the fact that Aegir itself runs on a combination of Drupal core (a CMS/CMF), drush, and contributed modules. Given that the core of Aegir's user interface models Drupal's, and gives easy access to the internal drush output behind its "tasks", it should be somewhat easier for existing users of Drupal to adopt and extend.
Aegir is also extensible. Some particularly interesting contributed modules include the following:
The presentation was presented at Amherst University in Amherst, MA. You can view the presentation here, although the live presentation included a lot more live demos and visuals of the Aegir UI, including a video of how to automatically install Aegir via apt-get on a fresh Linode server:
http://www.slideshare.net/sethviebrock/drupal-campma-aegir/