At Caxy, we build out our Drupal sites on the Acquia cloud. As an Acquia partner, we have experience with working the provider, and have tips on why it might be the best solution for your next Drupal project.
What is Acquia?
Acquia is a company that provides enterprise products, services, and technical support for the open-source web content management platform Drupal. We have partnered with Acquia to help us to manage and host both our site as well as client sites.
As an Acquia partner, we’ve shifted to doing all our internal and client-facing site development and hosting on the Acquia platform. Acquia provides a great repository based workflow layered on top of a cloud-based virtual hosting environment. We love it. At Caxy, we’ve built Drupal websites for years. Before Acquia, the administrative overhead of Drupal projects was high. Every client project needed a development, staging, and production environment. Each of those sites had to be set up, manually, and attention paid through the whole project to keeping everything in sync. The nature of agency work is such that projects often start, stop, and resume. This kind of workflow added additional administrative overhead to keeping user password and database credentials documented.
Needless to say, we were delighted when Acquia came along. First and foremost, the workflow is a great framework for team collaboration. The starting point is the git based workflow. This by itself is a great concept for Drupal development for all the virtues of a VCS. With Drupal 8, exporting the configuration into git helps even further keeping the config documented and consistent. In the Acquia environment the repos are already set up, the development and stage environments are already set up, all of which saves a ton of time to get a project going. Most of the headaches of deployment are eliminated as deployment is just pushing code. Git and the automated backups are also a great safety net.
Added to all of this, are the benefits of a cloud-based hosting environment. Worrying about capacity, bandwidth, and storage are all but eliminated knowing that it is possible to scale up or down an instance. Having Acquia handle the hosting also means that basic server security is in the hands of a full team of dedicated professionals, again eliminating another class of problems to worry about.
So all in all, hosting and developing our sites via Acquia eliminates a huge chunk of problems to worry about and lets us focus on what we love doing most: designing and building great Drupal sites. This means we can take on more projects, get them going faster, and get them live faster, which our clients love as well.
Why host sites on Acquia Cloud?
For our Drupal Sites at Caxy,
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The workflow is great for a team to work on a site together
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Repos are already set up, we don't have to do it ourselves
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Using repos is good to do, as all changes are tracked
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The workflow makes syncing prod to stage to dev really easy
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The workflow makes pulling databases from any of those sites easy
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The automated backups of each site allays my existential dread and fear of bad things happening
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Deployments are easy (just pushing to repo(s))
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A dedicated security team also gives peace of mind
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Cloud-based infrastructure means you don't have to configure it all yourself
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You can scale up or down if needed
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All sites are hosted and managed in one place
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Nice for teams and access control
Where to get started?
Interested in using Acquia Cloud for Partners in your organization? All existing Acquia Partners are eligible to utilize the tool. Learn more here!
