Cloud Platform

Overview

 

Note

Cloud Platform documentation refers to both the Cloud Classic and Cloud Next versions of this product, unless otherwise noted.

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:

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.

Note

Cloud Next has improved security and updated reference architecture. Therefore, it neither includes any deprecated function nor selects customizations available on previous versions of Cloud Platform.

To request specific functionality not otherwise listed on this page as Temporarily unavailable features, contact your Acquia account team.

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

Important

Some of the following platform behaviors may require changes to your custom scripts, cron jobs, CI/CD automations, or standard development processes. If your Cloud Classic environments are scheduled for upgrade to Cloud Next, audit your application to ensure that the changes that can be made prior to the upgrade are deployed before the scheduled maintenance date. Also, prioritize the changes that cannot be made prior to the upgrade so that they are deployed immediately after the maintenance event.

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

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.
  • 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.
  • File copy operation times out after 12 hours.
  • Cloud Next currently does not support Site Factory. For more information, contact your Acquia account manager.

Temporarily unavailable features

Important

Before upgrading your environments to Cloud Next or launching a new application on Cloud Next, review the Temporarily unavailable features to ensure that you will not require them before they are available on Cloud Next.

The following Cloud Platform dashboard and infrastructure features, settings, and modules are not supported on the current version of Cloud Next, but will be added in an upcoming release:

The following Acquia products and services may not operate as expected on Cloud Next, depending on their configuration:

Deprecated features

The following features will not be supported on Cloud Next at any point after launch:

Acquia recommends that all subscribers use Cloud IDE instead. For more information, contact your Acquia account team.

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