As a Drupal developer for 7 years, I’ve shed plenty of (mostly figurative) blood, sweat, and tears over the sites and modules I’ve built. At Acquia, I work on our Cloud tools, making sure my fellow developers never have to worry about many of the issues I used to deal with constantly. There are three basic areas where Acquia Cloud makes developers’ lives better.
“Don’t make me think about hosting”
The Acquia Cloud platform is fully managed, meaning you don’t have to worry about servers, scaling, monitoring… it just works. That’s because Acquia Cloud is the only Drupal Platform-as-a-Service to provide an SLA on site uptime, meaning we guarantee that your site will stay online at least 99.95% of the time. Other hosting providers only offer an SLA on their platform. You also no longer have to know what acronyms like FISMA, PCI DSS, CSA STAR, and SSAE16 mean, since Acquia Cloud is compliant with those standards making it by far the most secure Drupal Platform-as-a-Service. Finally, Acquia delivers on performance, with a stack and configuration tuned by the world’s best Drupal experts to get the most out of Drupal.
If you tuned all that out, that’s a good thing: we built it so that it’s not your problem any more.
“Make me faster”
Acquia’s Continuous Integration workflow makes staging your code, databases, and files as easy as dragging-and-dropping. You can work with your site using the Drush aliases we provide, or use Dev Desktop if you prefer a GUI. It’s the ease of day-to-day tasks that really make a difference in delivering projects on time, and our staging environments and development workflow are designed to fit the way you work while promoting best practices. We also have a number of efforts in the pipeline to take this workflow to the next level and keep you on the cutting edge of productivity.
“Make my site better”
Acquia Cloud provides a number of tools to help you monitor your site and troubleshoot issues.
- Log Streaming shows you all your logs from all your servers in real time, making it easy to debug issues fast. You can also filter the logs using regular expressions to search for specific issues. For example, you can use the Varnish and Apache request logs to investigate if your site is running unusually slowly, and the Drupal watchdog log might be useful to dig into unusual traffic patterns.
- The Task Log and Activity Stream show you the activity that’s been happening on your site so you can see what changes other developers have made.
- Acquia Insight analyzes your Drupal site and makes recommendations to improve its performance and security. It’s a great sanity check and provides useful best practices. You can also write your own custom tests and plug them into Insight, which is great for ensuring that custom modules or other site-specific behavior perform as expected.
- Uptime Monitoring shows you whether your site is online, and if it’s not, alerts you with the error to help you debug (such as DNS not responding, site in maintenance mode, etc.).
- Platform Health is a new feature currently in private beta that shows you how your stack is performing. For example, it shows MySQL slow queries, a common source of Drupal pain. It also correlates code deploys and Varnish cache clears so that you can see if recent changes have made CPU or memory spike.
- A subscription to New Relic comes with your Acquia Subscription, giving you additional views into your stack’s performance.
- Education is available to keep your Drupal skills top-notch through our documentation, partnership with BuildAModule and Drupalize.me, and training programs.
We’re constantly working hard to expand this list and ensure our developer experience is the best available. To try it out, you can sign up for Acquia Cloud Free.
