Information for: DEVELOPERS   PARTNERS   SUPPORT

Comparing Cloud Platform hosting environments

Cloud Platform delivers comprehensive Drupal infrastructure support from a single vendor, and offers the following levels of service for hosting Drupal applications in the cloud:

  • Cloud Platform Professional: A self-service Drupal hosting environment built for developing and deploying one or more production applications.
  • Cloud Platform Enterprise: A fully managed, high-availability, scalable, clustered Drupal hosting environment built for the most complex Drupal applications with the highest performance and uptime requirements.

Both Cloud Platform Professional and Cloud Platform Enterprise deliver a complete cloud-based infrastructure to support Drupal deployment workflow processes from development and staging through to production. Cloud Platform includes broad developer user interfaces and APIs, secure infrastructure access using SSH, and automated deployment from a version-controlled code repository.

Cloud Platform Professional and Cloud Platform Enterprise use the same user interface. For the purposes of the Cloud Platform user documentation, you can assume that all instructions apply equally to Cloud Platform Professional and Cloud Platform Enterprise, unless otherwise stated.

Paid Cloud Platform Professional and Cloud Platform Enterprise applications each have three environments by default: development, staging, and production. Optionally, Cloud Platform Enterprise applications can use additional environments.

The following table provides a more detailed comparison between Cloud Platform Professional and Cloud Platform Enterprise:

  Cloud Platform Professional (Online) Cloud Platform Professional (Contract) Cloud Platform Enterprise
Pricing Billed monthly on credit card. See pricing. Annual contract. Contact Acquia for pricing details. Annual contract. Contact Acquia for pricing details.
Infrastructure Single infrastructure with web, file system, and database services all running concurrently and Varnish® caching supplied by non-dedicated load balancers. Single infrastructure with web, file system, and database services all running concurrently and Varnish® caching supplied by non-dedicated load balancers. Customizable, highly available cluster of multiple web nodes spanning at least two availability zones. Optional multi-region failover add on.
Uptime No Service Level Policy, but in practice, 99.90%+. No Service Level Policy, but in practice, 99.90%+. 99.95% availability SLA, as outlined in our Service Level Policy.
Load balancers Two shared. Two shared. Two shared. Available add on for dedicated load balancers.
Capacity Management Self-service maintenance. Downtime occurs when resizing capacity. Managed Managed
SSL Certificate Self-service Self-service Self-service
Platform CDN Not available Not available Included
New Relic Included Included Included
Log visibility Included Included Included
Stack Metrics Included Included Included
Acquia Edge Not available Not available Add on available
Acquia Support Yes, infrastructure assistance only. Yes, infrastructure and Drupal support. Yes, see the Support Users Guide.
Cloud CD Not available Not available Included based on subscription tier.
Cloud IDE 1 IDE included 1 IDE included Included based on subscription tier.
Code Studio Not available Add on available Add on available
Site Studio Not available Not available Included based on subscription tier.
Acquia Search Not available Included Included
Platform Email Included Included Included
Log forwarding Not available Not available Add on available
Multi-region Failover Not available Not available Add on available

Cloud Platform Professional details

Cloud Platform Professional is a self-service platform, while Cloud Platform Enterprise is fully managed by Acquia. Here are some examples of tasks that Acquia performs for Cloud Platform Enterprise customers, which Cloud Platform Professional customers must manage for themselves:

  • Detecting and responding to changes in traffic that require resizing infrastructure or making other changes in available resources
  • Detecting and responding to denial of service attacks
  • Restarting infrastructure
  • Recovering from backups

Since you manage several of your own infrastructure settings on Cloud Platform Professional, there is the risk that improper use of these settings can lead to infrastructure instability or poor application performance.

If you have a Cloud Platform Professional subscription you want to upgrade to Cloud Platform Enterprise, contact sales@acquia.com.

Cloud Platform Enterprise details

Cloud Platform Enterprise supports customized infrastructure and integration, with customized reverse proxy, infrastructure, caching, and database sizes. For example, some Cloud Platform Enterprise applications may require comparatively more database resources, while others may require comparatively more or larger infrastructure. Cloud Platform Enterprise supports custom integrations for use cases like single sign-on or integration with other enterprise systems.