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.

Why Acquia Cloud IDE is the Favorite Drupal Development Environment of Professional Web Developers

May 4, 2021
5 minute read

If you're a professional Drupal developer starting a new Drupal project, you’re likely eager to jump in and start writing code. Still, even professional developers can run into roadblocks when kicking off a new project. From installing and upgrading software and jumping through security hoops to setting up tools like Composer, Drush, and xDebug, Git etc. — there’s a lot that needs to happen before you can start coding. Why dampen all your enthusiasm with extra steps when you could have a fully optimized Drupal environment from day one?

For large professional dev teams, having a simple, standardized, repeatable development process is critical. The need for speed, efficiency and reliability is why we’ve created Acquia Cloud IDE, a browser-based source code editor and a Drupal development stack running on the Acquia Cloud Platform. Acquia Cloud IDE is the only cloud-based IDE for Drupal development. Other approaches to Drupal coding, like native LAMP stacks and local Docker containers, may still work fine at the individual level, but an IDE goes beyond the basic capabilities of these tools to empower professional developer teams to deliver valuable solutions fast and at scale.

Less Set-Up and Maintenance Means Devs Can Make Immediate Impact

Developers typically have to jump through hoops to get their local machine ready to begin writing code and contributing to a project. You inevitably have to research, download, install, configure and troubleshoot a stack of tools before the “real work” can begin. With multiple development teams and workflows, all this set-up time is multiplied and leads to greater issues like missed launch deadlines, complex IT maintenance and added confusion and complexity when handing code off to other partners and customers.

Cloud IDE instantly offers developers a full stack of optimized development tools, among which are PHP, Composer and Drush readily installed and configured for the simplest, fastest onboarding process. Our quality assurance tools ensure that code is functional, compliant and efficient, so individuals won’t waste time troubleshooting divergent environments.

Working from a standardized development environment means consistency across all teams and contributors. With everything in the Cloud, there’s no need to grant system or admin privileges to developers on company or personal hardware or configure network and firewall exceptions.

No matter the scope and scale of your development projects, Cloud IDE gives you the best of both worlds in terms of a standardized workflow without sacrificing the speed and flexibility at an individual level to edit code and make changes quickly. The Cloud IDE user interface allows users to browse and discover the files in their directory or project and immediately begin editing code. Cloud IDE also provides a customizable command-line terminal, which is fully integrated with the Acquia CLI. Adopting Cloud IDE across an entire development team means devs can address all of their unique needs and increase individual productivity while multiplying total impact.

Optimized for Drupal and Backed by Enterprise-Grade Security

Setting up a local Drupal development environment has its own unique challenges. There are multiple requirements to run Drupal and development tools and operating systems can vary between teams. Acquia has always been the only enterprise organization optimized for Drupal and Cloud IDE is purpose-built for Drupal development. Alongside the unparalleled hosting capabilities of the Acquia Cloud Platform, Cloud IDE comes with all the Drupal development and debugging tools you could ask for and is optimized to run at blazing speeds. With other IDE solutions, developers have to struggle to download large databases locally on their own machines and worry about network issues that can delay projects. However, the Acquia Cloud network is optimized to speed up networking operations between IDEs and the Acquia Cloud environment.

A cloud-native environment also guards against potential risk and vulnerabilities. There’s no need to grant system/admin privileges to developers on company or personal hardware or configure network or firewall exceptions. CISOs can rest easy at night knowing sensitive code and information isn’t being stored on an employee’s personal machine.

With Cloud IDE you can:

Write, run and debug Drupal applications as a service in Acquia’s Cloud.
Integrate with Acquia Cloud environments and 200+ Cloud APIs.
Maintain security of your code deployment process.
Perform real-time code changes and view results immediately.
Do it all in a CLI.

If you’re a seasoned developer looking to enhance the development process throughout your entire organization, learn more about how you can get started coding with your own Cloud IDE environment in less than 15 minutes with our Getting Started Miniseries on YouTube.