Building Success on Acquia Cloud. Buyer s Guide

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1 Building Success on Acquia Cloud Buyer s Guide

2 Building Success on Acquia Cloud Table of Contents Executive Summary Benefits and Challenges of Developing Drupal Sites in the Cloud... 4 Benefits and Challenges of Hosting Drupal Sites in the Cloud Four Key Considerations in Evaluating Your Options Evaluating DIY vs. Acquia Cloud... 7 Summary and Recommendations Building Success on Acquia Cloud

3 Executive Summary The cloud has reached an inflection point for businesses. There s no longer a question of whether the cloud can provide value the value is proven. Lower costs, increased agility, and increased flexibility are reproducible results proven across industries. The next-generation hosting solution, however, must provide not only the service for hosting an application but also the environment in which to build that application. You must consider which will help you achieve true cost savings and time-to-market benefits: Do it yourself (DIY) or hosting with a partner. This ebook will walk you through: The benefits and the challenges of developing as well as hosting a Drupal application in the cloud What you should consider when evaluating DIY versus cloud hosting A worksheet to simplify calculating costs to compare DIY versus developing and hosting on Acquia Cloud, Acquia s Drupal-tuned Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) 3 Building Success on Acquia Cloud

4 Benefi ts and Challenges of developing drupal Sites in the Cloud Option 1 You have three options to consider for your drupal site: develop the site locally on premise; develop your site in the cloud by creating your own platform; develop in the cloud using PaaS. Option 1. local development has its benefi ts. With complete control over building development, testing, and production environments, you can tune those environments to your exact specifi cations. You also can create all the tests and run them via command line. Option 2 The drawback. You have to create the environments and test every time you want to create a new application. And you must maintain the environments, including servers and system software. This requires signifi cant staff time time that takes developers away from actually developing. Option 2. developing in the cloud by creating your own platform typically brings cost benefi t because hosted resources are less expensive than those in your own data center. The drawback. Although costs may be lower, your investment of time is still relatively high because you ll need to build separate development, testing, and production environments, along with all the tests needed to make sure the code is sound before going live. Option 3 Option 3. developing in the cloud using PaaS combines the cost benefi t with the advantages of increased speed of delivery. Because PaaS typically includes pre-established development, staging, and production environments, as well as automation of the most common tasks, applications can be built at the speed of the web. in addition, some PaaS options provide additional tools for application lifecycle management that take away the burden of the mundane tasks and free up your developers to focus on delivering business value. The drawback. You must give up some control with a PaaS. The environments may not match your desired specifi cations. However, if the provider offers an Application Programming interface (APi), typically your technical team can gain some control over the environment. 4 Building SuCCeSS on ACquiA Cloud

5 Benefi ts and Challenges of Hosting drupal Sites in the Cloud Option 1 You have three options to consider for hosting your live drupal site; host your site on-premise with physical resources; host your site in the cloud, but manage and maintain the cloud environment yourself; host the site using a PaaS. Option 1. in the span of a few years, the cloud has made on-premise hosting nearly obsolete. organizations that are currently hosting on-premise are those that have already invested signifi cant resources to build their own servers, or are still under contract with server providers. The reasons for continuing these investments span from data security concerns, to a lack of experience with the cloud, to fear that certain it positions would become unnecessary. Option 2 The drawback. With on-premise hosting, not only is the cost prohibitive, but the costs incurred are considered capital expenses, rather than operational. in addition there are zero agility benefi ts, which means your team is racking, stacking, and maintaining, rather than putting that time into creating a great digital experience. And this option usually requires a larger internal team. Option 2. Many organizations initially adopted the cloud by simply purchasing virtual resources from Rackspace, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or other providers, and setting up their own environments, which they tune and maintain. Cost benefi ts are seen immediately, and because there are no long-term contracts, organizations have very little cost risk. in addition, it pros appreciate the ability to save cost while not feeling like they re relinquishing control over the resources. Option 3 The drawback. The most challenging aspect of hosting your drupal applications directly with AWS or Rackspace is that the environment is not tuned to be optimized for drupal. There are optimal requirements for scalability, redundancy and high availability, load balancing, and failover that require drupal expertise. Without this drupal hosting expertise, many organizations fail to deliver a high performing and highly available drupal site. Option 3. The fi nal option is to host your drupal site on a PaaS. There are PaaS options that are drupal-tuned, such as industry-leading Acquia Cloud. By hosting with Acquia, you not only gain a drupal-tuned platform, but an entire team of drupal hosting operations experts. it s pre-built to provide the optimal drupal experience and performance. Acquia s team of drupal experts is there to help your team identify ways to improve your application and to increase performance and reliability. in short, signifi cant cost benefi ts are seen, and a team of drupal and hosting ops specialists are available who ensure reliability for you. The drawback. Typically, the PaaS environment is maintained and controlled by the vendor, which removes the ability for your internal team to tune the environment. 5 Building SuCCeSS on ACquiA Cloud

6 Four Key Considerations in Evaluating Your Options To evaluate a move to the cloud and the best approach for a particular organization, there are four factors that you should consider: agility, scalability, security, and control. Agility. How important is time-to-market? If it s critical, moving to the cloud is essential. The DIY approach will provide your technical team with more control, but will not provide all the agility benefits of PaaS. Your team would still need to maintain different environments, as well as ensure application quality. Scalability. The idea is that your best day (of unanticipated high traffic) never becomes your worst day (where your site fails due to lack of capacity). Downtime occurs in both on-premise and the cloud. It s necessary for maintenance. It s the unplanned downtime that can be crippling with on-premise because it s up to your team to find the resolve. The DIY in the cloud approach introduces some risk because when virtual resources fail without warning, you need to have a 24x7 team available to address the problems. This is a minimum of two and a half staff. And, the virtual resource provider only ensures the lights are on, so in many cases the outage may be application related. With a PaaS that can identify immediately whether it s an infrastructure or an application resource and how to fix it, your team is saved precious time. Security. Research has shown that security is superior on cloud infrastructure. For instance, Alert Logic conducted a study of 70,000 security breaches at over 1,500 companies within a 12-month period and found that cloud-based web applications are subject to security attacks significantly less frequently than on-premise applications. Control. How important is it that your team physically manage your resources? Whether on premise or in the cloud, DIY resource management lends control to your team, but it also requires more internal time and resources as well as more expertise. If your organization can relinquish virtual resource management and maintenance to a team of experts, you can see further cost benefits. We ll also see organizations adopt cloud services for the improved security protections and compliance controls that they otherwise could not provide as efficiently or effectively themselves. Forrester Research 6 Building Success on Acquia Cloud

7 evaluating diy vs. Acquia Cloud This section showcases evaluating your diy costs two ways. First, we ll look at the costs of establishing an environment for developing your drupal application. We ll also look at the cost of establishing an environment for hosting your drupal application. Your environment should include the tools needed not only to develop your application, but to test for quality, deploy it, and maintain it. Please complete this section to incorporate up-front and ongoing costs for these activities. Establishing an Environment for Building your Drupal Application Topic development and testing tools Application deployment tools Application maintenance Task Up-front Costs Man Days Daily Rate On-going Maintenance Man Days Daily Rate Total Year 1 Cost 1. Build separate development, testing, and staging environments. 2. Build rules on top of environments that protect production environment from receiving code or fi les that haven t been tested. 3. develop a system for integrating with version control technologies, or conducting version control. 4. Build scripts that will run tes and build automation for executing those scripts. 1. Build a system that tracks activity and creates logs of activity for other team members to see. 2. Build a system for defect detection that conducts static code analysis. 3. Build a system that would test your code security. 4. Build a process that automates deployment when your code has successfully passed tests. 1. Build a system that tracks all drupal modules in your application and provides you with alerts when patches or updates are available. 2. Build a system that continually tests your application performance, security, and whether you re utilizing drupal best practices (keeping up with module updates and security patches). Total Cost: Total Yearly Cost How to Complete This Evaluaton 1. Estimating daily rates. Most of these development projects will require 2+ FTes. if you re unsure of the daily rate, these numbers provide an estimate if you re evaluating using internal resources for these projects: Conservative ($1,000/day) Moderate ($1,400/day) High ($2,000/day) if you re evaluating hiring a development shop and contracting resources, the estimates are higher at: Conservative ($1,600/day) Moderate ($2,000/day) High ($2,500/day) 2. Estimating man days. Create a cross-functional it team to evaluate how many days each development project would take. include it operations, it Architects, and developers. Although the projects will vary, you can conservatively estimate: Architecting and Building projects typically take 5+ days Confi guration and Set-up tasks will typically take 2+ days Maintenance tasks typically take 1 day/month 7 Building SuCCeSS on ACquiA Cloud

8 Your hosting environment build will require: infrastructure Monitoring and alerts to continually test the performance of the infrastructure Security with system hardening and security monitoring FTes to conduct all infrastructure operations tasks Please complete this section to incorporate up front and ongoing costs for these activities. Establishing an Environment for Hosting Your Drupal Application Topic Hosting platform build System health monitoring test and alert build Security system and processes build Cloud operations management Task 1. implement operating system, confi gure storage, and set up/confi gure database servers. 2. Confi gure network fi le system to ensure replication and redundancy. 3. Confi gure web servers and implement reverse proxy, incorporate load balancers. 4. Architect redundant environments for failover, and procedures that automate failover. 1. Set up lamp stack availability monitoring. 2. Architect db backups and restores. 3. Set up monitoring and automatic alerts for CPu usage, disk space, web server running state, errors, PHP processes, MySql availability, varnish stats, packet stats, and data transmissions. 1. implement hardened systems including minimum privileges and processes, restricted fi rewall, and iptables rules, and ongoing security tests against your os. 2. establish vulnerability scan processes and automate tests against app and infrastructure. 3. Build a system that identifi es hacking attempts. 1. implement hardened systems including minimum privileges and processes, restricted fi rewall, and iptables rules, and ongoing security tests against your os. 2. establish vulnerability scan processes and automate tests against app and infrastructure. 3. Review system health logs, conduct security tests, review security performance, and resolve issues. 4. Continually test and maintain the failover environment. 5. Complete all software updates (os, security patches, bug fi xes). 6. implement itil best practices for change management. Up-front Costs Man Days Daily Rate On-going Maintenance Man Days Daily Rate Total Year 1 Cost Total Cost: Total Yearly Cost Estimating a Cost Comparison with Acquia each customer s requirements are unique. our customers have realized signifi cant savings with Acquia Cloud. Maxim, the largest young men s lifestyle magazine in America, decreased their hosting costs by 60 percent. SeMi is the global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the micro- and nano-electronics industries, and they saw 65 percent reduction of their hosting costs. 8 Building SuCCeSS on ACquiA Cloud

9 Summary and Recommendations Although each organization s requirements are unique, the desire for companies to decrease time-to-market and reduce costs is not. Digital disruption has paved the way for constant innovation, and companies that cannot keep up will not thrive. When the next Pinterest or Facebook launches, will your team be capable of delivering integration with those technologies immediately? Acquia Cloud will give your team the freedom to continually focus on adding value to your digital experience. Completing this evaluation will provide a true assessment of all costs that must be considered in weighing a DIY versus a PaaS solution. At Acquia, we are confident that when you know all the costs, the choice will be simple. While competing in today s marketplace, constant innovation, agility, and freedom to realize your digital vision must be considered in any total cost of ownership. Acquia Cloud will provide the assurance that you can keep pace with the consumer and provide the Great Digital Experience required for success. Call us and let s talk about how we can get your first site up and running today! Learn more acquia.com LETS TALK 9 Building Success on Acquia Cloud SKU EBOOK