This section of the Cloud Platform documentation describes how Cloud Platform works, including information about the Cloud Platform architecture, security, high availability features, and compliance with standards and regulations.
Cloud Platform provides a robust managed solution for mission-critical Drupal applications. Traditional hosting services may provide little more than virtual machines, leaving you with the task of managing and running the servers. With Cloud Platform, you bring your code and files, and Acquia handles the rest. Acquia takes care of selecting, deploying, and maintaining a Drupal-optimized platform. Cloud Platform provides high availability elastic cloud resources with configuration management, monitoring, optimization, and caching built in, all backed up by an operations team which consists of cloud and Drupal experts ready to respond 24x7.
Cloud Platform applications run on a Drupal-optimized platform hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment. The core of the platform is an open-source LAMP server stack, combining the Linux (Ubuntu) operating system, Apache web server, MySQL (Percona) database, and PHP programming language with Drupal. Cloud Platform servers are built on the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and Elastic IPs (EIP).
The exact configuration of a Cloud Platform application’s infrastructure depends on several factors, including whether the application is part of Cloud Platform Enterprise or Cloud Platform Professional. The following diagram displays an example of a Cloud Platform Enterprise application and how the components interact with one another for different user profiles:
In comparison, the following diagram displays an example of a Cloud Platform Professional application and its component interactions:
As indicated in the previous diagrams, Cloud Platform Enterprise and Cloud Platform Professional applications each have four main components:
For more information, see Cloud Platform technology platform and supported software.
Compared to Cloud Platform Professional, Cloud Platform Enterprise provides more features for high availability, including redundant server instances at each level of the stack and greater levels of support, including unlimited application support and an operations team available 24x7 to remotely administer your applications and change your infrastructure on demand. For more information, see Comparing Cloud Platform Professional and Cloud Platform Enterprise.
Cloud Platform is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, which is physically remote from Acquia’s offices. The AWS environment consists of major regions and Availability Zones. Cloud Platform customers may choose the geographic region for their application’s location. Cloud Platform supports the following zones:
Applications hosted by Cloud Platform are isolated using several security controls, but internal traffic travels over the same network inside Acquia’s shared virtual private cloud (VPC).
For subscribers interested in additional security, Acquia offers the following options:
Note for subscribers with Acquia Search and Acquia Shield
Although you can access your Acquia Search instance from inside a dedicated VPC, Acquia Search cannot exist inside your dedicated VPC Learn more.