Overview¶

Cloud Platform is a Drupal-tuned application lifecycle management suite with a complete infrastructure to support Drupal deployment workflow processes from development and staging through to production. Cloud Platform includes powerful developer user interfaces, a strong focus on security and compliance, a robust API, and automated deployment from a version-controlled code repository. It runs on proven open-source technologies that Acquia has selected, tested, and optimized for Drupal. With Cloud Platform, Acquia delivers comprehensive Drupal infrastructure support from a single vendor.

Key features¶

Cloud Platform gives you:

• Easy installation of any Drupal distribution.
• Great developer workflow tools that make it easy to deploy content with drag-and-drop features across separate development, staging, and production environments.
• Logging and monitoring tools that give you insight into the health of your application.

Cloud Platform supports businesses of any size with a variety of subscription levels:

• Cloud Platform Professional provides a self-service environment built for developing and deploying one or more production websites.
• Cloud Platform Enterprise delivers a fully managed, scalable, multi-server service, with high availability.

Cloud Next and Cloud Classic¶

Cloud Next is the name of a major update to Cloud Platform, introducing improved performance, security, and resiliency for applications at any scale. Acquia’s non-Kubernetes version of Cloud Platform is referred to as the Cloud Classic infrastructure.

How to know a Cloud Next environment¶

To know if your environment runs on Cloud Next:

1. Sign in to the Cloud Platform user interface.

2. Select your organization and application.

   Environments that run on Cloud Next are indicated with the following icon:

   

Key benefits of Cloud Next¶

The Cloud Next infrastructure leverages more powerful cloud-based technologies to maximize application performance, security, and resiliency, especially during periods of high load. Powered by Kubernetes and enhanced with Acquia’s unique optimizations for Drupal, Cloud Next leverages ultra-secure container-based isolation and advanced data management technologies to ensure that your applications accommodate almost limitless scale.

Environments running on Cloud Next technologies have the following benefits:

• Dynamic auto-scaling that is faster and more automated than ever before
• Re-architected file system, delivering data as fast as 10 GB per second
• Re-architected database layer, delivering up to 5x the throughput of databases running on more traditional MySQL infrastructure deployments
• Self-healing infrastructure to ensure that containers are constantly refreshed and unhealthy pods are automatically pruned
• Invisible platform updates for most types of maintenance to reduce noise and maximize availability
• Atomic code updates to ensure clean builds on new containers during every code deployment
• Reduced deployment downtime and impact of deployment mistakes
• Web layer software isolation to ensure that Drupal, Memcached, Cron, SSH, and Cloud Hooks always have the resources they need to operate performantly without interfering with each other
• Optimized Memcached architecture to improve cache resiliency
• Storage growth beyond 1 TB on file systems and databases
• Easy access to historical logs with up to 30 days of logs available through the Cloud Platform user interface and Acquia’s Cloud API v2
• Dedicated pods for different services to optimize resource isolation and resiliency
• Option for hosting applications in the same or different physical hosting locations
• Dynamic real-time headless applications, multi-brand experiences with composable commerce, employee intranet with static sites
• Provision to build, test, and deploy on the end-to-end platform for Drupal development
• Default end-to-end encryption for all traffic in the Acquia infrastructure.
• Ability to leverage the Code Studio add-on
• Access to Cloud Actions
• Available in all hosting regions. For more information on your supported region, contact your Account Manager or see AWS infrastructure regions.

Changes to Cloud Platform features¶

As a result of newer technologies utilized by Cloud Next, some Cloud Platform features behave differently for environments running on Cloud Next, including:

• Security and compliance
• Infrastructure Page
• Users and keys page
• Stack Metrics
• SSH
• Memcache
• Memcache Memory Limit
• Historical Log Access
• Code Deployments
• Changing Environment Settings
• Cron

Cloud Next limitations¶

• Cloud Next is optimized for the current Drupal version. Applications running unsupported versions of Drupal might not operate as expected on Cloud Next and may be adversely impacted by periodic platform updates.
• Cloud Next does not support cron jobs that run more often than once every five minutes. If you run cron more often, configure such jobs to run no more than once every five minutes. Otherwise, they may not get completed as frequently as scheduled.
• Cloud Hook deployments that take more than an hour to complete will fail on Cloud Next. If you have a Cloud Hook deployment that is expected to take an hour, you must review and update code accordingly.
• Enabling stampede protection and lock management in Memcache might cause downtime in environments running on Cloud Next technologies. For more information, see Disabling stampede protection and lock management in Memcache.
• Currently, file and database copy Cloud Hooks do not work in the mixed mode (Cloud Next and Cloud Classic) environments.
• Cloud Next does not support database backups beyond 50 GB. Database backup operation times out after 12 hours.
• Cloud Next currently does not support Site Factory. For more information, contact your Acquia account manager.

Evaluating Cloud Platform¶

• Learn about Cloud Platform hosting environments.
• Learn about the Cloud Platform user interface.
• Learn how to install a fresh Drupal distribution on Cloud Platform.
• Learn how to integrate Cloud Platform with your existing continuous integration workflow.

References¶