Cloud Platform
New Cloud Features & UX Improvements
Acquia is constantly working to improve our service offerings, and that means cleaning up existing features and adding new ones that we know will make a big difference in people's workflow for the better. Despite the scale of some of these improvements, they're not always immediately visible at first glance, so I've taken a bit of time to highlight three recent ones.
We've talked about log streaming in previous blogs when it was in beta, but we're now taking it out of beta after very positive feedback during the beta period. I've been using this feature for myself to diagnose issues with a few Drupal 8 experiments I was running on Cloud, and it has already proven invaluable. The ability to sort various logs by log type, source, string and regular expressions is incredibly powerful, and it's available right in the user interface.
Barry Jaspan discussed log streaming in a bit more detail and provided a quick 26 second video of the functionality.
Acquia Cloud Free already has a significant amount of disk space allotted per site when compared to other free offerings, but we've noticed various situations in which even this much space is a limitation. For example, users trying larger distros like the Demo Framework have hit this limit, so we wanted to open up Free Tier to larger self starters who wanted to try out the product. To that end, starting next week, we'll begin allocating 1 GB of space per site on Acquia Cloud Free. This should open the door for larger sites that would like to experiment and make it easier to build a full site for free. Now you'll only need to upgrade to Acquia Cloud Professional when you're ready to go to production.
In an effort to improve the user experience of Acquia Cloud, later this afternoon we will launch an updated user interface for our site listing page to provide a cleaner and more streamlined experience. This has been in the works for a while and it improves the UI by exposing a more intuitive and dynamic site filter and minimizing a lot of the visual clutter from our previous interface. We've removed unnecessary data and bubbled up important administrative features of Acquia Cloud reducing the amount of data shown on the page and giving greater weight to the elements that are there now. Included amongst these elements are Insight scores which are dynamically loaded to improve page load times for customers with a large number of sites. We really think this is going to make a lot of difference in navigating Acquia Cloud's user interface and streamlining how people use it.
We expect these improvements will have an immediate and positive effect on our customers and we have a lot of other great improvements that are currently under development for release in the near term future. All of these features are either available today or will be in the next week, so go forth and give them a try. Let us know what you think and we'll keep everyone in the loop on future feature releases.
I'm Kris Vanderwater, Drupal developer and Acquia's Developer Evangelist. My job is to help you the developer get the most out of Drupal and Acquia's products and services. If you ever have questions, comments, or concerns, reach out to me any time. I've included some ways to contact me below.
Google+: Kris Vanderwater
LinkedIn: Kris Vanderwater
Twitter: @EclipseGc
IRC: EclipseGc
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