Acquia Offers Drupal-Tuned Cloud API

Acquia, an enterprise-level, turnkey suite of tools for the administration of the popular open-source content management system Drupal, has released its own application programming interface for cloud-system deployments.

Drupal, which has been online since 2001, has been estimated to power about 1.5 percent of the world’s websites. Drupal is maintained and developed by a community of more than 630,000 users and developers and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

Back-end system

It is used as a back-end system for sites, ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political and government sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration, Acquia said.

The Acquia Cloud is a Drupal-tuned platform as a service (PaaS) that currently hosts hundreds of Drupal sites, serving more than 5 billion http requests and about 1 billion page views per month, Acquia Vice President of Marketing Bryan House told eWEEK.

The freely downloadable Acquia Cloud API, introduced at last week’s DrupalCon conference, enables developers to customise Acquia Cloud’s capabilities, including adding features such as developer workflow, site management and provisioning.

Open-source software can at times be difficult to install, deploy and maintain. The Cloud API is designed to simplify the entire Drupal ecosystem so that developers and enterprises alike can save time and accelerate web deployments.

Gateway to the cloud

Cloud API also serves as a gateway for developers who need to integrate Acquia Cloud tools into their web properties. Developers can automate testing, data cleansing and other operations to ensure data and code quality is consistent across environments.

As a result, Acquia is able to provide an alternative platform for professional developers, distribution builders, and web design agencies to rapidly roll out new sites and businesses.

Features of Acquia Cloud API include:

• Streamline site building: Developers can tightly integrate Acquia Cloud developer tools into their own site(s), application or non-Acquia hosting environment to take advantage of Acquia’s extensive continuous integration tooling and management services.
• Automate custom operations: Through Cloud Hooks, Acquia Cloud performs custom scripts and commands triggered on workflow actions; for example, sanitizing production databases, or running predefined tests every time code is deployed from Dev to Stage.
• Accelerate time-to-deployment: Provision new sites programmatically on Acquia Cloud from within any Drupal distribution or by using scripting interfaces, such as a Drush Make file.

Acquia’s customer base of about 2,000 enterprises includes such high-visibility names as Twitter, Al Jazeera, Turner, Intuit, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, Mercedes-Benz and NPR.

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