Introducing Acquia Cloud Next: The Kubernetes-Native Drupal Hosting Platform

From the start, Acquia has been on the forefront of delivering ambitious digital experiences for leading global brands by leveraging Drupal, as well as industry-leading technologies from Amazon Web Services (AWS). For more than 12 years, Acquia Cloud Platform has served as the best Drupal hosting solution in terms of performance, security and flexibility. Today, we're proud to announce Acquia Cloud Next, an enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native Drupal hosting platform.

Improved Application Performance with Maximum Uptime

We built Acquia Cloud Next from the ground up to work for all customers, no matter the size and breadth of their demands. It represents a major update to our existing Acquia Cloud Platform services and includes new technologies designed for speed, security and resilience. Updates include:

• Faster dynamic auto-scaling - Automatically scales cloud capacity in seconds 
• Web layer software isolation - Ensures Drupal, Memcached, Cron, SSH and Cloud Hooks always have the resources they need to operate efficiently
• Completely re-architected database layer - Delivers up to 5x the throughput of databases running on more traditional MySQL server deployments
• Self-healing infrastructure - Automatically ensures cloud capacity is always healthy and performant

These enhancements are backed by our collaboration with AWS to guarantee optimal application performance with no need for human intervention. Acquia and AWS continue to empower brands to focus on creating new value with the confidence that their sites will remain performant, available and secure. 

Elastic Cloud Capacity to Handle Traffic Spikes and Scale Automatically 

As the world faced extreme changes and uncertainty over the past year, people’s reliance on digital technologies has increased substantially. Companies need to have confidence that their application infrastructure will continue to function optimally even in the most extreme circumstances. 

Acquia Cloud Next empowers platform administrators to meet unpredictable spikes in demand at global scale in a new digital-first era. This enhanced version of Acquia Cloud Platform continuously monitors application uptime and performance, detects failures, reroutes traffic and scales experiences automatically without additional assistance. 

At Acquia, we’ve supported some of the highest trafficked events in the world, including coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics, the World Cup and the Australian Open. Acquia Cloud Next improves upon those performance capabilities and keeps all sites stable while handling hundreds of millions of pageviews or traffic influxes instantly with no downtime or architectural changes. 

With our recent release of bundled New Relic APM Pro services on all Cloud Platform subscriptions, Acquia customers can constantly monitor their site performance to better understand critical site health data, such as response times and end-user error rates.

Maximum Security and Resilience Eliminates Unexpected Risks

This same forward-thinking philosophy also applies to security. Acquia Cloud Next expands upon our already highly available cloud platform infrastructure and enables manual and continuous backups to offer increased resilience, monitoring and security. A microservices architecture gives security teams greater flexibility to address and respond to security needs if they arise. Teams are able to more quickly identify vulnerabilities and resolve the issue without disrupting a customer’s entire tech stack or other applications. 

All containers are regularly refreshed and any unhealthy code sequences or technical debt is automatically pruned. Further, by partnering closely with security experts from AWS and other best-in-class organizations, Acquia can ensure that customers running on Acquia Cloud Next infrastructure will automatically gain the benefits of Acquia’s managed services, which automate the process of patching and routinely scanning all layers of your stack for maximum and ongoing security. 

So, What’s Next for Cloud Next?

Acquia is committed to providing customers with the fastest and most secure Drupal hosting platform in the market. As Acquia Cloud Next features become available, customers will gain access to a free upgrade to Acquia Cloud Next with all of its new advantages and improved performance.

Talk to your Acquia account team today to learn more about your eligibility and upgrade timelines, and read more about Acquia Cloud Next in our documentation.