Acquia Cloud technology platform and supported software¶

Acquia Cloud runs on the following technology stack:

Component	Version
Web server OS	Ubuntu 16.04 (changelog)
Web server	Apache 2.4.18 (upgrade notes)
Load Balancer	Nginx 1.12.1 (changelog)
Database	Percona Server 5.6 (changelog) (MySQL 5.6 (changelog)
PHP	PHP 5.6.34 (changelog), PHP 7.1.18 (changelog), PHP 7.2.6 (changelog)
Caching proxy and load balancer	Varnish 4.1.8 (changelog) Nginx (changelog)
Memory cache	memcached 1.5.1 (changelog), memcached 2.2.0

Notes regarding memcached

To use memcached 2.2.0 with PHP 5.6, add the following code to your: settings file:

# Drupal 7 $conf['memcache_extension'] = 'Memcached';
# Drupal 8 $settings['memcache']['extension'] = 'Memcached';

Memcached is not available on Acquia Cloud Free

Supported software and features¶

Acquia Cloud supports:

Your Drupal 8 or Drupal 7 code
Drush 5 through 8
Integrated version management (Git)
SSL Certificates (additional fee required)
Automated disaster recovery backup
Custom cron jobs
Shell access using SSH
File access using sftp and rsync
MySQL administration using the MySQL CLI or other tools
The current and prior major release of the Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari web browsers

In addition, Acquia Cloud Enterprise supports the following Enterprise features:

High-availability failover using multiple Amazon Web Services data centers (Availability Zones)
Outgoing VPN access (Cisco VPN compatible - additional fee required)
Shared authentication or single sign-on using LDAP or SAML (contact your Sales Engineer for cost and compatibility information)
Multi-region replication (additional fee required)

All Acquia subscribers receive access to the following Acquia services:

Acquia Search - Easily add scalable search to your website
Insight - Information about your Drupal website’s optimization and security

Users of Node.js features on Acquia Cloud can find stack information at Resources and limitations for Node.js environments.

Included software¶

Your Acquia Cloud server includes the following (non-complete) list of software packages:

Software	Version
APCu	4.0.11 (changelog)
ClamAV	0.99.3 (changelog)
Development tools (vim, emacs, gcc)
Drush 5 through 8 (default version: Drush 8)	5.11, 6.6, 7.1, 8.1.17 (changelog)
Git	2.7.4
Ghostscript (changelog)
jpegtran
OpenSSL	1.0.2 series (changelog)
pngcrush
ssh2	0.13 (changelog)
sysgdig	0.13.0

The following programming languages are included with Acquia Cloud:

Language	Version
C
Perl
PHP	5.6.34 (changelog), 7.1.17 (changelog), 7.2.5 (changelog)
Python	2.7.14 (changelog), 3.5.x (changelog)
Ruby	2.1.9 (changelog)

PHP 7 support note

Drupal 8 - PHP 7 is fully supported on Drupal 8, and the official Drupal core test suite passes for all supported database engines (including MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL). For details, see Support PHP 7 on Drupal.org.
Drupal 7 - Drupal core officially supports PHP 7. Acquia recommends fully testing before upgrading your production website, as there are several backwards incompatible changes.

Acquia Cloud also includes the following items:

Common Linux command-line utilities
Standard networking tools (including curl, wget, and traceroute)
Performance analysis tools (including ps, top, and strace).
Common PEAR and PECL libraries
Common PHP modules (including PDO, FreeTDS, OpenSSL, json, curl, and xml). For detailed information, go to your Drupal website’s PHP information page at /admin/reports/status/php

Unsupported software¶

Acquia Cloud does not support the following software:

Moodle (not compatible with high availability)
piwik (we have repeatedly seen this cause performance issues)
Any non-Drupal Content Management System (CMS)
CA Single Sign-on (formerly CA SiteMinder)

The following software cannot be installed on Acquia Cloud:

Non-standard database software, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server
Custom daemons or services, such as Jabber or Microsoft Exchange
Custom package installations that require apt-get

You can still install custom executables using your code repository.

Some Drupal contributed modules are incompatible with Acquia Cloud, or may require special configuration or care. For more information, see Module incompatibilities with Acquia Cloud.

Configuration changes¶

The Acquia Cloud platform uses configuration management systems to ensure stability and consistency. As a result, we do not support custom OS configuration changes, nor are we able to make arbitrary customizations to configuration files such as Apache virtualhosts. Among other problems, such changes can cause your installation to fall outside the test suite for releases and upgrades, and any changes may not reliably survive a relaunch.

Supported customizations include: