At Acquia, we have both an open API to integrate with existing pipelines tools and our own Acquia Pipelines to automate the building and testing of code. Furthermore, with Acquia Cloud CD, we incorporated the creation of a production-like development environment to be automatically enabled for testing. This furthers the efficiency of the continuous delivery process.
Scaling with architecture
Over the past few years, a new approach to adding scale to digital teams has emerged. Decoupled or headless architecture strategies allow front-end and back-end web development teams to change how websites and applications are developed. In this approach, teams meet at the beginning of the project to agree on requirements.
Rather than the front-end (design) team awaiting the completion of the back-end design, they can begin developing the frontend immediately. Open APIs from web content management systems, like Drupal, enable this process to work. Rather than requiring the details of back-end structure, the front-end team needs only the design of the API to have the frontend “fetch” content from the back end.
Acquia launched our Node.js service for this use case in 2017. This service incorporates the support for JavaScript frameworks running on Node.js web servers to our traditional Drupal stack. The end result is a seamless architecture and workflow to enable teams to leverage not only a decoupled approach to how the front-end and back-end teams work together, but also a decoupled approach to how the application is designed.
No matter what your application, you are going to need to plan for it to scale. This may be due to the size of the team you have supporting your digital strategy, growth in traffic to your site or application, or more ambitious features incorporated into your site. When you are considering how to scale, consider that it requires much more than just hardware.