Matthew Grasmick

Senior Director of Product

Matthew joined Acquia’s Professional Services team in early 2013 as a Technical Consultant with over five years of Drupal development, training, and consulting experience. Since joining Acquia, he has acted as a consultant for major federal agencies by providing technical leadership and conducting workshops to impart his expert knowledge on Drupal best practices. He first joined the Drupal community in 2008, when he opened a development shop catering to businesses in the Washington DC area. He is now an active, enthusiastic community member who has contributed to dozens of projects via hundreds of code commits; he passionately believes in the open source movement and the future of Drupal.

Acquia Cloud IDE is the Best Drupal Development Environment

November 2, 2020
5 minute read

Incredulous? Let me explain.

Setting up a local development environment for Drupal has always been painful. There are so many options out there (Lando, Drupal VM, Docker, DDEV, Docksal, etc.) They each have their pros and cons, but they all share a common characteristic: they run on your own computer. This creates a set of inescapable challenges.

With every local development solution, you have to download, install and troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is made especially difficult because your computer isn't exactly like everyone else's. Your problems are unique because your computer is unique. You're either on Windows, Mac or Linux. You have unique directory structures, unique hardware and unique security concerns.

Acquia Cloud IDE is the solution. It's the only Cloud-based IDE for Drupal. We've done all the configuration and optimizing for you.

With Cloud IDE, you still have your own development environment, but now it’s in the Cloud. That means you don’t have to download, install or troubleshoot software on your own machine. Don’t worry about Windows, admin privileges, slow hardware or firewalls. Acquia Cloud Platform will spin up a brand new environment for you and it will work “out of the box.”

You can download modules, themes, or really whatever you want. You can write code, sync easily with Acquia Cloud, or integrate with any third party service you’d like. It’s already got everything installed that you could need for development. Composer, Drush, NPM, you name it. You can even use Xdebug right out of the box. It “just works.”

That’s why it’s the best development environment for building Drupal applications. You won’t find an easier solution.

The Value of a Fast and Simple Dev Workflow

For a single engineer, Cloud IDE can materially improve daily life. Having a fast, reliable and ready-to-go environment means less time head scratching and more time coding.

It’s a stack that you don’t need to maintain or update. No more “Well, it works on my machine,” or “Can you help me with this error?”

Adopting Cloud IDE across an entire development team multiplies its impact. Standardizing on Cloud IDE means more efficient development, faster onboarding and scalable teams. Just ask Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In their recent presentation at Acquia Engage 2020, members of AMD developer team, Andy Glover and Peter Wood shared how Acquia Cloud IDE revolutionized AMD’s development process. Here’s what they said:

“As a Windows shop, Drupal development was slow, frustrating and required a lot of manual configuration. Cloud IDE has freed up developer time to actually focus on development. The remote environments feel blazing fast by comparison, and our laptops are all faster without running Docker and Drupal on them”

Before they standardized on Cloud IDE, the AMD team often dealt with frustrating inconsistencies in their workflow. Development was frequently halted while one team member tried to figure out why they were seeing errors, but the rest weren’t. Each developer was dealing with solving separate, unique errors on their own bespoke set up. By switching to Cloud IDE’s browser-based environment, developers could write, test and deploy new code at record speeds!

If you registered for Acquia Engage, you can login to listen to the full story that AMD shared in “Build better, faster and more efficiently with Drupal.”

How Can I Get It?

If you’re not an Acquia customer, request a personalized demo of Cloud IDE.

Otherwise, you likely already have access to a Cloud IDE! All of our Acquia Site Factory and Acquia Cloud Platform customers get at least one Cloud IDE included in their subscription. Talk to your account manager or file a support ticket if you’d like more.