In this session, we'll talk about using Acquia Cloud's Free Tier for setting up your dev environment.  Acquia Cloud Free comes with a development and staging environment.  These accounts are easily upgradable to add a production server into the mix as well.  You don't need to be a seasoned DevOps pro to get going, but advanced users can add in the power of Cloud Hooks to enable CI right within the system. This all comes at the low low cost of totally free.

Here are some things that using Acquia tools can for you:

  1. Automated deployment of code using GIT.
  2. Seperate Dev and Stage environments.
  3. A complete Drupal-tuned LAMP stack with Varnish.
  4. Deploying code via Drag and Drop interface.
  5. Drush aliases out-of-the-box with no config necessary.
  6. Configuration analysis with Insight showing how to improve your site.
  7. Your own Acquia Search Solr index.
  8. Mollom Spam protection to keep bots off your forms.
  9. Full access to the Acquia Library just for signing up.
  10. Provide a consistent working local environment for your entire team.

To set up an environment like this yourself would take many hours.  You'd have to maintain it yourself and that means you'd spend less time doing whats important to you:  building sites for your clients.  Combine Cloud with Dev Desktop, and you've got a fully working Drupal stack both on your local machine and running on the cloud.

We'll go over the process of setting up Dev Desktop, an Acquia Cloud free tier site, Installing Drupal and importing your site straight into the Cloud.  We'll look at tools like Acquia Insight and Acquia Search that you can enable on your site to super-charge its performance and searchability.  We'll also talk about setting up some basic cloud hooks so that you can automate tasks during code deployments to your dev, staging or production site.

Attendees should come away with working knowledge of how to use the Acquia Network including Dev Desktop and Cloud.  Attendees are encouraged to follow along and try out Cloud on their laptop during the presentation.  Some knowledge of version control (GIT) is assumed but not required to use these tools.