Acquia Cloud: Code Workflow & Local Dev

When you spin up sites for a living, velocity is important. The developers at Acquia understand this, which is why we're always looking for ways to make website development simpler and easier. Because that equals faster.

Many of our customers are already using these tools and practices. But we'd like to spread the word further.

We know you're facing really challenging situations. We've got tools that will help you get past them, without taking up an entire afternoon. We can speed you up, and speed up your team.

In this series, we're highlighting four ways Acquia can streamline the website-building process. In our first segment, David Stoline, Acquia Cloud Engineering Manager, focuses on...

Simple Code, Workflow, and Local Development

One of the biggest advantages to using the cloud is speed. In the cloud, developers can build new sites and applications fast.

Yet it's easy to undersize the amount of work required to get started, which can impact your ability to predictably ship code and cause technical debt to build up.

With Acquia Cloud, projects start faster because only Acquia offers a simple code and workflow process completely integrated with a local development environment that can be used offline. Whether you're looking to work in the cloud or on your local machine, you can stay within Acquia's integrated environment.

Simply login to your Acquia Cloud or Acquia Dev Desktop with your credentials, and you'll get access to all your subscriptions and sites. And Acquia enables you to share this same environment with your team. You can launch a brand new project and share it with your team, or pick up from where another team member may have left off.

And when a new member joins the team: just point him or her at Acquia's integrated environment, and they will be up to speed and productive before you know it.

Start from wherever is faster and easier: from a local environment, or from the cloud. Import, download, or clone... and get going. The tight integration between local environments and the cloud gives you flexibility work either online or offline.

Other platforms fall short on integrating code with workflow, requiring you to switch between various processes and interfaces. Acquia Cloud provides you with integrated code and workflow, which allows you to simply drag-and-drop code, files, and databases between your development, staging, and production environments. By contrast, local development on other platforms often requires you to assemble pieces from multiple vendors to build a solution.

Compare that to Acquia's Dev Desktop application, which brings together many valuable tools into one interface. Git, a command line interface, PHPMyAdmin, Drush, and SSH -- they are all a click away on Dev Desktop. No need to waste time setting up an environment.

Do you need to switch to a different version of PHP? You can do that from inside Dev Desktop.

If you're working on multiple sites, you can manage hundreds, or even thousands of sites from Acquia's tightly integrated local and the cloud environments. Try doing that by assembling your environment from multiple vendors.

Once you've launched, you'll find that Acquia's workflows and local environments make it easier to maintain your sites.

Acquia's tools allow you to easily re-integrate your remote and local environments, enabling you to work wherever, with the confidence that Dev Desktop will let you easily sync your code, database, and files with your Acquia subscription once you're back online.

Other platform providers can't provide this: you'll discover that you can sync some things, but not everything. Or you'll find that the process is entirely manual and not automated.

Acquia's workflows and local development tools are built to provide you automation and predictability, while maximizing your velocity -- enabling you to start building from day one.