Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

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1 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

2 Table of Contents The Journey You ve Accepted The Freedom of Open Source and Power of Drupal Manage and Deploy Tens, Hundreds, or Thousands of Sites Git and Continuous Integration Workflow Acquia Cloud Has Your Back Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

3 The Journey You ve Accepted If you re reading this introduction, it means that you ve accepted the journey ahead of you. Welcome. Your task? To find an enterprise-class website delivery solution that enables your technical team to build, deliver, and manage many websites easily in a fast, flexible, and controlled manner, using a standardized code deployment and maintenance approach, and ultimately, solving real-world problems being experienced in today s fast-paced business environment. Along this journey, you ll have some help. In this ebook, you ll read about the four reasons your technical team will love Acquia Cloud Site Factory, a solution that is designed to make your life easier and help your technical team kick some serious behind. Built on the open source content management system Drupal, Acquia Cloud Site Factory is a cloud-based website management platform that allows users to create, manage, and deploy tens, hundreds, or even thousands of beautiful sites in record time from one unified dashboard. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. 3 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

4 reason number one The Freedom of Open Source and Power of Drupal Before we start our journey, we ll first want to begin with an understanding of the open source landscape. It s a place where freedom, collaboration, and innovation all coexist. I know, it s awesome. Open source has revolutionized what many teams have done with larger legacy platforms to help everyone hold the keys to faster innovation. Open source software is free of licensing and hefty contracts. It has given small shops stable and standard code bases, which allow its customers to get more for less. Developers can pitch in and actually add value back to the open source projects (this keeps tech folks happy and engaged we like shiny toys). The value of such a tool is added to by communities and adoption. Adopters regularly contribute to open source projects and make them better, more robust, and easier to understand. Therefore, it s always evolving and improving. Mature open source projects have extremely thorough documentation and often have open forums where people can ask questions and get help. More and more people are turning to open source projects to meet their IT needs. As such, projects like Drupal, WordPress, jquery, and many others are becoming household names to stay relevant with the current IT landscape. Other tools, such as Vagrant, Puppet, NodeJS, AngularJS, and more, are rapidly innovating in ways enterprise software packages cannot keep up with. The key concept is that these tools are solving problems every day. Open source means that you can ask for help, and others can as well. As with most open source projects, you have the opportunity to leverage code from other open source projects as well as enable others to make your code better and more secure. The other key part of open source technology is innovation. Simply put, your technical team can deploy code faster, optimize it better because there are more eyes on it, and pivot quicker given the ability to own and manage your own code. With open source, you have control over how you pivot as an organization, and how agile your technical team can be. With Drupal, you get all of this with one platform. Drupal is an open source content management platform that enables companies and teams to build awesome websites that bring together content, community, and commerce. The capabilities and flexibility of Drupal will empower your team to solve real problems at a faster pace. They need a solution that will allow them to: Standardize deployment and maintenance Learn and use one tool to build any application Leverage code and configuration across implementations Easily modify the behavior of the product s core But the consumer also has the opportunity to know exactly what code is running and what that code does. So, there is freedom in a financial sense, but also in the ability to see and own your own code. 4 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

5 They need a single platform that meets their needs. They need Drupal. Unlike the tangle of middleware stacks and web applications that many organizations are dealing with today, Drupal has the breadth of capability needed to assemble almost any kind of website quickly. Drupal is infinitely extensible developers can add their own custom functionality to any facet of the platform, while building custom distributions and module plug-ins to make a site crush competitors. Drupal is both easy enough to develop and deploy small sites quickly, yet powerful enough for the world s largest and busiest websites. The Drupal community continues to improve performance and expand the functionality of the Drupal platform. In early 2011, Drupal 7 was released the result of efforts from nearly 1,000 contributing developers and testing from the community at large, which at the time of this writing is over 1,000,000 strong. The capabilities and flexibility of Drupal will empower your team... 5 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

6 reason number two Manage and Deploy Tens, Hundreds, or Thousands of Sites Okay, now that you get open source and the power of Drupal, let s continue our journey. It s probably pretty easy for you to image using these innovative technologies for one, two, or a handful of sites. But there comes a time when you are creating digital properties for hundreds or thousands of products, services, artists, or causes. How do you manage, control, and deploy all of these awesome websites? Well, it s actually a good problem to have, because it means that you re truly thinking about how to best engage with your users. It also means we ve arrived at a place where Acquia can help. Meet Acquia Cloud Site Factory, a many-site management platform with the capability to create, manage, and deploy tens to thousands of content rich sites in record time. Acquia Cloud Site Factory can: Spin up sites very fast Produce completely branded site designs Manage thousands of sites from one platform 6 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

7 When you start deploying large-scale sites, certain patterns of need arise: You can identify a common set of engaging features, branding, page layouts, and user roles and permissions across some, many, or all of your sites. When you see these patterns emerge, Acquia Cloud Site Factory provides you with the means to capture and reuse those basic structures quickly as best practices through the use of site templates. With the site template approach, you ll eliminate duplication of effort when configuring your sites while achieving a high degree of consistency, so you can tame the chaos of creating hundreds of sites through a simple, repeatable process. Creating and Deploying a Site Template Chances are by this point in your own professional development you ve realized that identifying patterns can help you quickly solve a recurring problem within a given context. For example, if you re a record label, there s a pattern to how your artists sites are developed. If you re a higher education institution, you ve identified the pattern for delivering department and student organization sites. At an even larger scale, a globally recognized consumer pharmaceutical brand has global product, campaign, event, and promotional sites that are based on common patterns. 7 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

8 Once you ve identified these website patterns, a huge opportunity awaits: With Acquia Cloud Site Factory, you can capture the patterns within one or more site templates and repeatedly launch sites based on these templates through a predictable, repeatable approach. Define a site s common configurations, information architecture, layout, brand elements, and third-party integrations within the template, and from there the process for creating new sites is as easy as 1-2-3: 1. Create a new site from the desired site template. 2. Add brand-specific content and design to the new site. 3. Assign a custom domain. Once you have a site template, you have the blueprint for the sites that you ll create within your website factory. You can begin creating predictable, repeatable websites at scale, reducing cost and the complexity of the process. Creating new sites based on your template is very easy. You ll have the choice of creating an exact copy of the site (full site clone) or just the structure (clean copy). The clean copy includes only user accounts with administrator or site maintainer roles and the content created by these users. A full site clone includes all users and all content. Once a new site is instantiated from the template, you are ready to complete the configuration and customization of the site to reflect the brand and its goals. How you build the front end of your site depends on the type of website factory you need. If the sites all need to have the same overall look and feel for a high degree of consistency, such as sites for each of several hundred professionals, your front-end team can build the theme into the template. If you need unique sites with a consistent back end, you can build a base theme into your template, then hand off new sites to your front-end team to add creative content. In either case, your front-end developers can continue using the skills and tools they use today to author CSS, and then transfer the CSS into the ThemeBuilder and the HTML into nodes. Configure site-specific settings, add content, and your site is complete! With Acquia Cloud Site Factory s site template approach, creative users can make distinct and exceptional web experiences based on a solid and consistent site structure. You have a predictable, repeatable process to spin up as many sites as you need with agility and speed. 8 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

9 Organize and Group Sites Sites created within Acquia Cloud Site Factory can be placed within site groups, which allow you to organize related sites and control who can see and access them through the Acquia Cloud Site Factory dashboard. For example if your organization operates in multiple geographic regions, with one set of websites created for North America and another set for Europe, you can create two groups, one for each region, with only the users assigned to each respective group able to see the appropriate sites. Site groups support nested groups, and sites can belong to one or more groups. This enables organizations to create site hierarchies within the Acquia Cloud Site Factory dashboard that are consistent with their business s organizational structure. 9 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

10 reason number three Git and Continuous Integration Workflow You ve heard of Git. Of course you have, who hasn t? With Acquia Cloud Site Factory, you can add custom or contributed Drupal code to your websites through a many-site developer workflow. A single Git code repository is used to manage the single Drupal codebase that powers all sites created within Acquia Cloud Site Factory. Simply add an SSH key, and you have command-line access to the Git repository, enabling you to add either your own custom code or any of the large number of contributed modules available from the global Drupal community on drupal.org. part of the staging environment s site population and code deployment processes, you ll have access to status reports and logs to ensure the staging process completes smoothly. Once you have validated your code changes against the replicated production sites in your staging environment, you can deploy the code release to your production environment through the update code link in the Acquia Cloud Site Factory Administration tab. Once again, you ll be able to track the code update deployment status while it is performed automatically on all of your production sites. The Acquia Cloud Site Factory code deployment process sequentially places each site into maintenance mode, updates the Drupal code, and then makes the site live again within a matter a minutes. There are no extended outages across all production sites while the updates take place, enabling you to minimize the impact on your site visitors. Boom. ACSF is optimized for a many-site continuous integration experience. Creating a CI platform, with a staging environment configuration identical to your production server to avoid nasty surprises when code is deployed, is a mammoth undertaking for an individual organization. You can take advantage of both Acquia Cloud Site Factory functionality and the multisite CI workflow for your own custom or contributed code. Here s how: Using both the Acquia Cloud workflow interface and administration features in Acquia Cloud Site Factory, you can populate a staging environment with scrubbed production sites that allow you to test your new code against a representative set of production sites. As Acquia will check in at regular intervals for updated distribution code in the Acquia Cloud Site Factory Git repository. You can then merge the new distribution code with your custom Drupal code for testing prior to production deployment. Acquia will inform you of the availability of new distribution code through the Acquia Cloud Site Factory release notes RSS feed and through regular support channels. Acquia provides detailed documentation on all these processes, and Acquia Support can help with any questions you might have. The Acquia Cloud Site Factory PaaS tier multisite CI workflow adds a powerful customization capability to the Acquia Cloud Site Factory and provides a capable toolset at your disposal for building and delivering a large number of great digital experiences for your constituents. 10 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory

11 reason number four Acquia Cloud Has Your Back preconfigured and ready for Drupal development and make testing and deploying code in small batches easy. Developers can build their own tests into the environment by using our Cloud API, Acquia Insight. For applications in production, Acquia Insight runs 130+ tests against the Drupal code to evaluate performance, security, and Drupal best practices. This combination of tools enables developers to focus on coding and stop fighting fires. Infrastructure and application support. Once the application is launched successfully in production, it still needs to be maintained continually. Acquia Cloud customers gain a significant extension to their team through our Drupal application and cloud operations support teams. We re available to help triage any issue, whether it s Drupal or infrastructure related, and ensure your success. We work 24x7x365 so you don t have to. Acquia Cloud has three main aspects: Hosting platform. Acquia Cloud consists of a Drupal-optimized technology stack, built on Amazon elastic Compute Cloud (ec2). Drupal-tuned means Acquia has selected technologies to run on top of Amazon because Drupal scalability needs are unique. Across all layers database, file system, operating system, and web server Acquia Cloud uses technologies proven to ensure scalability and reliability for high performance Drupal sites. Development tools. Acquia Cloud includes an entire suite of application assurance tools that take the guess work out of performance tuning and quality assurance activities. The development workflow environment comes with three pre-established environments: Development, Stage, and Production. The environments are Have you heard of the Grammy s? Emmy s? Olympics? Two words: Acquia Cloud. LETS TALK 11 Four Reasons Your Technical Team Will Love Acquia Cloud Site Factory SKU EBOOK