This page applies only to Cloud Platform. To access the documentation, select Cloud Platform from the infrastructure list.
Each Cloud Platform application has a set amount of disk storage allocated to it. This page explains how Cloud Platform allocates and uses that storage, and how you can determine how much of that storage is in use by your application.
Introduction
Cloud Platform includes various storage volumes that have each been allocated for a specific purpose related to content management or service delivery. Some of these volumes are provided with platform default size limitations and may not be counted against your total subscription utilization, while file system and database storage are always counted against subscription entitlements.
For directories without contractually-defined storage capacities, Acquia assigns a default allocation of storage capacity to ensure that normal platform operations can be executed properly, including code deployments and maintenance events. Acquia reserves the right to adjust the nature, size, and content of these volumes as needed, including unscheduled purges of such directories, if such actions are deemed necessary to maintain the performance, stability, security, or long-term supportability of one or more infrastructure layers.
Many directories on Cloud Platform consist of storage volumes that allow their contents to persist for days or weeks, sometimes even after maintenance events. However, environments running on the Cloud Platform technologies have entirely ephemeral storage volumes on all directories, excluding the file system and database, unless otherwise noted. This means that only persistent directories or your codebase should ever be used to store files, content, or settings that need to persist for your application to operate as expected.
While working with different directories on Cloud Platform, ensure the following limitations and best practices:
Acquia recommends that Cloud Platform applications must not exceed 2 TB of total file system and database utilization. While Cloud Platform is designed and created with scale and throughput as the first principle, there is a threshold where the size of your file system and database storage can result in service delays, degradation, or both. Exceeding these recommended limits might impact certain services such as daily backups and the copies between environments. In addition, the timeframes of backup and restore operations might be impacted when disaster recovery efforts are required.
Git repositories must never exceed 2 GB in size.
Code in a single branch must not exceed 500 MB to avoid the risk of code deployment failures.
Keep Git repositories and associated branches as small as practical to ensure optimal performance during code deployment, site scaling, and diagnostic operations. Avoid including large files or unnecessary media files, such as non-theme images and any video files, prune unnecessary versions from your branch periodically, and tag history to keep your repository small and manageable.
Drupal pods are limited to 4 GB of active ephemeral storage. This is typically used by the platform for code or log management activities and shouldn't be expected to persist for more than a few minutes. Excess utilization can reduce uptime and site stability and may cause workloads to be evicted, leading to immediate loss of ephemeral storage.
Do not use temporary directories to store the files that are required to persist for more than a few minutes. These directories and the files within them are not shared between executions and at most should only be assumed present within the same PHP request, SSH session, cloud hook, or cron job during which the directory was populated with data.
Examining your disk storage utilization
You can review your disk storage utilization from the command line by connecting to your Cloud Platform environment using SSH.
To assess disk utilization in your public files directory:
ncdu /shared/sites/default/files/
To assess disk utilization in your private files directory:
$ ncdu /shared/sites/default/files-private
To assess disk utilization in the shared private files directory:
$ ncdu /shared/files-private
To assess disk utilization in the legacy files directory:
$ ncdu /shared/files
To obtain an accurate total that matches Acquia Cloud UI, ensure that you include all directories listed previously. The /shared/files-private directory is separate from /shared/sites/default/files-private and can contain additional data that contributes to reported use.
Alternatively, run a full recursive scan of /shared to capture all storage in one pass:
for nom in `find -L /shared -maxdepth 3 -user $USER -type d`; do echo -n "$nom => "; du -hs `realpath $nom` |cut -f1; done
The directories listed in /shared are symlinked to their respective locations in /var/www/html/docroot. The necessary directories may differ depending on your specific Drupal configuration to account for multisites or other non-standard locations.
Your home directory /home/clouduser can contribute to total reported storage use.
du -sh $(readlink -f /home/clouduser)
This command resolves the symbolic link to the actual path before calculating size, which prevents reporting a size of 0.
Important
Storage entitlements for your Cloud Platform subscription are structured as four independent buckets:
Filesystem (FS) — Production: Applies to your production environment only.
Filesystem (FS) — Non-Production: Applies to all non-production environments (development, staging, CD environments) as a shared pool.
Database (DB) — Production: Applies to your production environment only.
Database (DB) — Non-Production: Applies to all non-production environments as a shared pool.
Your contracted storage figure is the same number applied independently to both production and non-production. For example, a 500 GB FS entitlement gives you 500 GB for production AND a separate 500 GB shared across all non-production environments.
Non-production usage counting: When multiple non-production environments exist (for example, development and staging), only the single highest-usage environment counts against the non-production storage limit. Usage across non-production environments is never combined. For example, if your development environment uses 40 GB and staging uses 30 GB, only 40 GB counts against your non-production FS entitlement.
Backups (excluding Disaster Recovery snapshots) count toward the storage limit for the environment type — production or non-production — in which they were created.
The Cloud Platform user interface displays four storage usage cards for each subscription:
FS — Production
FS — Non-Production
DB — Production
DB — Non-Production
Each card shows current usage in GB, your utilization percentage, and the entitled limit for that environment type. The non-production card reflects the usage of the single highest-usage non-production environment — not the combined total of all non-production environments.
For detailed storage reporting, navigate to Manage > [Your
Organization
] > [Your ] > Storage in the Cloud Platform UI.
Filesystem
Cloud Platform environments on Cloud Platform technologies use different filesystems, as described in the following table:
Directories
Type/Scope
Drupal Setting
Description
/home/clouduser
Persistent/Shared
This is the login home folder, equivalent to the $HOME environment variable.
/var/www/html/docroot/sites/*/files/
Persistent/Shared
This is where Drupal places public files for Cloud Platform.
This is where Drupal places private files for Cloud Platform.
Disk Storage
This page applies only to Cloud Platform. To access the documentation, select Cloud Platform from the infrastructure list.
Each Cloud Platform application has a set amount of disk storage allocated to it. This page explains how Cloud Platform allocates and uses that storage, and how you can determine how much of that storage is in use by your application.
Introduction
Cloud Platform includes various storage volumes that have each been allocated for a specific purpose related to content management or service delivery. Some of these volumes are provided with platform default size limitations and may not be counted against your total subscription utilization, while file system and database storage are always counted against subscription entitlements.
For directories without contractually-defined storage capacities, Acquia assigns a default allocation of storage capacity to ensure that normal platform operations can be executed properly, including code deployments and maintenance events. Acquia reserves the right to adjust the nature, size, and content of these volumes as needed, including unscheduled purges of such directories, if such actions are deemed necessary to maintain the performance, stability, security, or long-term supportability of one or more infrastructure layers.
Many directories on Cloud Platform consist of storage volumes that allow their contents to persist for days or weeks, sometimes even after maintenance events. However, environments running on the Cloud Platform technologies have entirely ephemeral storage volumes on all directories, excluding the file system and database, unless otherwise noted. This means that only persistent directories or your codebase should ever be used to store files, content, or settings that need to persist for your application to operate as expected.
While working with different directories on Cloud Platform, ensure the following limitations and best practices:
Acquia recommends that Cloud Platform applications must not exceed 2 TB of total file system and database utilization. While Cloud Platform is designed and created with scale and throughput as the first principle, there is a threshold where the size of your file system and database storage can result in service delays, degradation, or both. Exceeding these recommended limits might impact certain services such as daily backups and the copies between environments. In addition, the timeframes of backup and restore operations might be impacted when disaster recovery efforts are required.
Git repositories must never exceed 2 GB in size.
Code in a single branch must not exceed 500 MB to avoid the risk of code deployment failures.
Keep Git repositories and associated branches as small as practical to ensure optimal performance during code deployment, site scaling, and diagnostic operations. Avoid including large files or unnecessary media files, such as non-theme images and any video files, prune unnecessary versions from your branch periodically, and tag history to keep your repository small and manageable.
Drupal pods are limited to 4 GB of active ephemeral storage. This is typically used by the platform for code or log management activities and shouldn't be expected to persist for more than a few minutes. Excess utilization can reduce uptime and site stability and may cause workloads to be evicted, leading to immediate loss of ephemeral storage.
Do not use temporary directories to store the files that are required to persist for more than a few minutes. These directories and the files within them are not shared between executions and at most should only be assumed present within the same PHP request, SSH session, cloud hook, or cron job during which the directory was populated with data.
Examining your disk storage utilization
You can review your disk storage utilization from the command line by connecting to your Cloud Platform environment using SSH.
To assess disk utilization in your public files directory:
ncdu /shared/sites/default/files/
To assess disk utilization in your private files directory:
$ ncdu /shared/sites/default/files-private
To assess disk utilization in the shared private files directory:
$ ncdu /shared/files-private
To assess disk utilization in the legacy files directory:
$ ncdu /shared/files
To obtain an accurate total that matches Acquia Cloud UI, ensure that you include all directories listed previously. The /shared/files-private directory is separate from /shared/sites/default/files-private and can contain additional data that contributes to reported use.
Alternatively, run a full recursive scan of /shared to capture all storage in one pass:
for nom in `find -L /shared -maxdepth 3 -user $USER -type d`; do echo -n "$nom => "; du -hs `realpath $nom` |cut -f1; done
The directories listed in /shared are symlinked to their respective locations in /var/www/html/docroot. The necessary directories may differ depending on your specific Drupal configuration to account for multisites or other non-standard locations.
Your home directory /home/clouduser can contribute to total reported storage use.
du -sh $(readlink -f /home/clouduser)
This command resolves the symbolic link to the actual path before calculating size, which prevents reporting a size of 0.
Important
Storage entitlements for your Cloud Platform subscription are structured as four independent buckets:
Filesystem (FS) — Production: Applies to your production environment only.
Filesystem (FS) — Non-Production: Applies to all non-production environments (development, staging, CD environments) as a shared pool.
Database (DB) — Production: Applies to your production environment only.
Database (DB) — Non-Production: Applies to all non-production environments as a shared pool.
Your contracted storage figure is the same number applied independently to both production and non-production. For example, a 500 GB FS entitlement gives you 500 GB for production AND a separate 500 GB shared across all non-production environments.
Non-production usage counting: When multiple non-production environments exist (for example, development and staging), only the single highest-usage environment counts against the non-production storage limit. Usage across non-production environments is never combined. For example, if your development environment uses 40 GB and staging uses 30 GB, only 40 GB counts against your non-production FS entitlement.
Backups (excluding Disaster Recovery snapshots) count toward the storage limit for the environment type — production or non-production — in which they were created.
The Cloud Platform user interface displays four storage usage cards for each subscription:
FS — Production
FS — Non-Production
DB — Production
DB — Non-Production
Each card shows current usage in GB, your utilization percentage, and the entitled limit for that environment type. The non-production card reflects the usage of the single highest-usage non-production environment — not the combined total of all non-production environments.
For detailed storage reporting, navigate to Manage > [Your
Organization
] > [Your ] > Storage in the Cloud Platform UI.
Filesystem
Cloud Platform environments on Cloud Platform technologies use different filesystems, as described in the following table:
Directories
Type/Scope
Drupal Setting
Description
/home/clouduser
Persistent/Shared
This is the login home folder, equivalent to the $HOME environment variable.
/var/www/html/docroot/sites/*/files/
Persistent/Shared
This is where Drupal places public files for Cloud Platform.
This location is used primarily by cron-wrapper.sh for persistent log storage, but can also be utilized by custom log files. Subscribers should prune outdated logs here on a routine basis to avoid them exceeding 1 GB in size.
This location is used primarily by cron-wrapper.sh for persistent log storage, but can also be utilized by custom log files. Subscribers should prune outdated logs here on a routine basis to avoid them exceeding 1 GB in size.
Cloud Platform