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Cloud hosting platforms. Part two: Acquia Cloud

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Documentation

Each category inside of a dashboard contains references to the documentation. Acquia provides extensive documentation and a number of articles about working with Cloud and Drupal, writing modules, working with drush aliases, ssh, cron, rsync, etc. - lots of useful things for the development process.

Acquia provides services that can be integrated into a site hosted on Cloud.

Acquia insight

Acquia Insight is a tool that looks through a site, evaluates its performance and security, and gives out Acquia Insight Score. A higher score means that fewer issues have been found. If you have ever struggled to explain to a client some technical problem the site has (e.g. why PHP code should be removed from blocks and panels), Insight may help you by highlighting these problems in a report and lowering the overall Acquia Insight score. Clients would like to see a nice green mark of “100%” there instead, so Acquia Insight can help you convince them to approve tasks on refactoring and optimization.

Acquia Search

Another service that works with Cloud is Acquia Search. It replaces a default site’s search through a database so it works faster. Acquia Search is a combination of Drupal module and software configuration on a server and it is based on Apache Solr and Facet API. However, you should be careful with the configuration of search indexes on different environments when using this module, otherwise, nodes from a dev site (or even a local machine) can make their way to search results on a live site. To prevent that, search indexes should be set in the read-only mode on all environments besides prod.

Conclusion

To sum up, Acquia Cloud is a hosting platform that integrates with a development workflow to help you spend time efficiently. By providing developers with isolated environments for different purposes, centralizing deployment in one interface and giving tools and documentation on how to use them, Acquia Cloud saves you time and effort.

Now you know some ways how cloud hosting can improve your work process, so you can test them yourself with a 30-day trial application on Acquia Cloud Free.

P.S. In case you have missed part one of this series of articles - check out what benefits you can get from another cloud platform - Pantheon.

Original Post: 

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web