Announcing the New Acquia Cloud UI

It has been nearly a month since we launched our new user interface for Acquia Cloud. Overall, we have received great feedback from customers. Some of you have even helped us identify things that will help us to continue to enhance your experience and enable you to develop, deliver and manage your applications even faster.

For this latest release, we have focused on customers who are running multiple applications on Acquia Cloud in an effort to improve their experience of managing both domains and databases.

Users will now be able to view multiple domains and databases with ease with the new pagination feature for both of these views. In addition, users may also filter in both database and domain views.

For customers managing multiple databases, we’ve added the ability to simultaneously backup databases. This improves your overall operational efficiency.

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Today, we’re happy to announce that Acquia Cloud is switching to a new and improved user interface (UI). The rollout for customers and users will be in phases beginning today through mid-December.

The new Acquia Cloud UI is a more modern, faster, and responsive user interface meant to improve a customer's user experience. The new UI simplifies interaction for developers and administrators, enabling the easy creation of powerful digital engagements. It delivers an architecture for future enhancements of the platform and follows an API-first development approach to support the next generation of digital experiences.

The new UI now features a detailed homepage that lists your applications, complete with overview information about each application as well as the ability to have a thumbnail image of the site.

What’s New

Acquia Cloud upgraded the UI for hosted customers to a responsive design and improved operations to enable faster, more secure site development. It also enables simpler division of roles, greater ease of use and overall more efficient digital experience management including:

• SSL certifications are now available in all environments rather than just production enabling greater security through the development process
• Managing users roles is easier with greater isolation of administrative and development workflows and a centralized administrator view
• A more responsive web design improves overall user experience

Now let’s take a closer look at the four main differences between the legacy UI and the new UI: terminology, workflow, permissions and SSL.

Terminology

We received a lot of feedback regarding the terminology in the legacy UI. Many users found it confusing and we took their concerns into account when designing the new UI. We have since clarified terminology. Here are a few examples:

Organization: The new UI introduces the concept of the organization. A customer, or what we refer to as an organization, buys an Acquia subscription that comes with an application. An organization can have many subscriptions and a subscription can have many applications. The organization manages access to subscriptions and applications. The legacy UI referred to this as a subscription group.

Application:An application encompasses different kinds of channels like websites, mobile apps, intranet, wearable apps, etc. The legacy UI referred to these as sites.

Environments: Each application has three environments: Development, Stage, and Production. In the new UI you can drill down to look at each environment separately and you can also change the labels for all three environments if you’d like. The legacy UI only had workflow overview and you couldn't change the label of the environments.

Scheduled Jobs: Legacy UI referred to as cron jobs.

New Workflow

The new Acquia Cloud UI establishes two major work areas: Develop and Manage.

This separates tasks related to developing and configuring your app and its infrastructure, typically performed by developers, from tasks related to administering your teams and subscriptions, typically performed by an administrator or team leader.

The developer uses the “Develop” tab and the team lead/administrator uses the “Manage” tab.

Develop tab

Manage tab

Improved Teams and Permissions

The Manage tab in the new Acquia Cloud UI (previously referred to as “teams and permissions”) is a more simplified and centralized way to manage teams, permissions, and access to applications and subscriptions. The new UI reflects this hierarchy better so you can see what organization you're in and manage teams within the organization.

When you click on the Manage tab you get an overview of all the organizations you are part of:

SNI based SSL approach

Another key piece of feedback we received from customers revolved around SSL management. The new Acquia Cloud UI addresses that feedback with the following changes:

• In the new UI, SSL certificates can now be added on a per environment basis, instead of just in production
• You can have multiple certificates defined per environment (only one active at a time)
• SNI based SSL is the default and you must purchase an ELB separately

For a deeper dive into the new Cloud UI, Acquia Academy has put together specific training courses tailored to the needs of our customers, our partners, and one for the Drupal community.

If you have any additional questions about the new Acquia Cloud UI or want more information, you can view the FAQs here or the updated Acquia Cloud documentation here.