acquia

Acquia is only three years old and focuses almost exclusively on open source platform Drupal, which makes its earning a spot on Forbes list of 100 most promising companies in 2011 a pretty impressive feat. Despite the company’s showing, Acquia is not yet a well-recognized name in enterprise circles. The appointment of two new board members may just change that.

I have to admit that I love to tinker with things. When I started playing with Linux first about 10 years ago, I realized that here was a "toy" that I'd be able to enjoy for a long, long time. I've often worked on server configuration and always had a lot of fun making servers work for big sites.

That said, I took Acquia's Dev Cloud for a spin and really like it. No hassles, it really has to be the simplest high-traffic ready system I've ever used.

If you don't know Dev Cloud, its a Drupal specific web hosting system. You get three separate "server environments" for each site - development, testing and live production. There is a web-based deployment tool to manage these environments. There are also some nice extras, like support, Apache Solr search and a handful of web services that you can use with your sites.

In my next post I'll go over how you get your site running on Dev Cloud and some of the best practices that we've found using it.

Drupal's lead programmer, Dries Buytaert, on building an open source community and creating the right kind of developer culture

Brandon Tate of Appnovation writes, "Here at Appnovation, we frequently use the Acquia hosting platform for our clients. The Dev Cloud and Managed Cloud are impressive platforms that fit well for many Drupal sites being built today. I’ve listed some items below that have helped with the overall build quality and ease of use for these platforms."