Building Success

on Acquia Cloud:
10 Layers of PaaS

TECHNICAL Guide

Table of Contents

Executive Summary .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Introducing the 10 Layers of PaaS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
The Foundation: Five Layers of PaaS Infrastructure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
A True Platform: Five Layers of Application Development with PaaS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Compare Acquias PaaS to Hosting Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2 10 Layers of PaaS

Executive Summary
A great digital experience is essential for success in todays digital marketplace.
Not only is building, deploying, hosting, and scaling web applications complicated,
but leaving resources available that allow for continuing innovation is crucial to
ongoing success. To make the most of the resources at hand and to speed
time to market, IT professionals have been making the move to Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS) offerings from companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS)
and Rackspace to host their business applications. Those same professionals,
however, are beginning to understand that IaaS really isnt the answer to their
challengesvirtual machines are just a starting point. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
is proving to provide the true value in this challenging environment. In addition to
hosting, PaaS provides the space to build, test, tune, and deploy web applications
in a secure way that guarantees performance.
This e-book provides an overview of the 10 layers of PaaS that application builders
and managers should consider when evaluating PaaS providers.

3 10 Layers of PaaS

Introducing the 10
Layers of PaaS
Acquia has identified 10 critical layers of PaaS solutions that provide the technology and business
support required for a great digital experience:
1.  Virtual resources. IaaS is a key building block for PaaS, but it is only the first piece of the
overall solution.
2. High availability. Architecting a redundant environment is an essential part of data backup
and disaster recovery strategy.
3.  Scalability. Being prepared for large increases in site traffic requires a high level of expertise
in site configuration, specifically as it relates to Drupal.
4. Maintenance and optimization. If you build it, you have to tune it. Each piece of
technology across the database, file system, and web layers will need to be tuned to
ensure performance.
5.  Monitoring. You did it before with physical resources, and its no different with virtual ones.
Most PaaS platforms have complex monitoring tools that catch either performance or security
threat activities before they severely affect your site.
6. Continuous delivery. PaaS offerings dont provide just virtual resources, they provide a
platform for application development. These solutions should include separate environments
for development, staging, and production, as well as tools to monitor developer activity,
automate testing, and assist with quality assurance.
7.  Application maintenance. A true PaaS provider will do more than simply provide
maintenance tools. Most offer the option of taking some portion of application maintenance
such as security updates on for you.
8.  Third-party tools. Most PaaS environments offer integration with third-party tools that are
considered essential for web development. For instance, Acquia Cloud integrates easily with
GitHub since many Drupal developers use it as their code repository.
9.  Application and infrastructure support services. The PaaS provider should offer
expertise in application development, as well as the infrastructure. The PaaS provider should
be able to serve as an extension of your team when help is needed.
10. Your custom code. The responsibility for building code exists with the customer and
typically is not provided by the PaaS provider. In SaaS models, sometimes the code
is included.

4 10 Layers of PaaS

The Foundation:
Five Layers of PaaS
Infrastructure
The 10 layers can be broken into two major areas. The first of those areas is PaaS Infrastructure.
This section details the five layers of infrastructure as provided on Acquia Cloud:
Virtual resources. Acquia Cloud is a carefully crafted platform optimized to run highly available
Drupal websites. We use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), among six other AWS resources.
Acquia has selected, configured, tested, and deployed the best open source platform for this
goal. Acquia Cloud provides infrastructure configurations ranging from a single shared server
to one or more dedicated servers. To ensure optimal maintenance and upgrades, all Acquia
Cloud infrastructure runs the same versions of the Linux operating system, Apache web server,
and MySQL database, as well as the Nginx reverse proxy load balancing server and Varnish for
page caching. This enables Acquia to efficiently provision, test, manage, monitor, and upgrade
the platform.
Redundancy. The AWS environment consists of major regions and Availability Zones. Acquia
Cloud customers may choose the optimal geographic region for their sites location. Each region
contains multiple Availability Zones. AWS Availability Zones are separate yet interconnected
data centers within the major regions. Acquia Cloud Enterprise offers high availability by using
two AWS Availability Zones in one AWS region with redundant servers serving each layer of the
technology stack. This serves as a redundant environment for disaster recovery should an outage
occur in the primary/master availability zone.
Configuration management. Acquia handles configuration management for three separate
use cases:
Use case 1. How do we configure the environment for immediate recovery in the event of
an outage?
Acquia maintains a comprehensive backup solution that includes website code, static files,
and databases. Integrated backup facilities use Amazons Elastic Block Store (EBS) and
Simple Storage Service (S3). Acquia makes internal disaster recovery snapshots of all data
every hour. These snapshots are programmatically stored in Amazon S3 buckets and used to
restore a site in the case of multiple disk failure or total data center loss. Backup data stored in
Amazon S3 is maintained in the same region where the production site is located.

5 10 Layers of PaaS

Use case 2. How do we configure the environment to add capacity in the event of an
unplanned traffic spike?
Acquia builds the elastic, virtual server configuration that you need. Using the automation
designed by the Acquia Cloud engineering team, Acquia operations is able to rapidly provide
a reliable environment and provision new resources on demand that can be active within
minutes to respond to changing traffic demands. Acquia uses custom APIs and central
management tools to provision new hosting clusters, attach storage volumes, and install
software and dependencies to provide uniformity in each customers environment.
Use case 3. How do we configure the environment so that its secure?
Acquia Cloud provides a secure platform where Acquia customers may build and manage
Drupal sites. Acquia configures, manages, monitors, and secures the environment where our
customers websites run, including the operating system and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL,
PHP) stack and network layers of Acquia Cloud. Acquia has a shared responsibility model with
AWS for security. While Amazon secures the virtual infrastructure and network and ensures
physical security, Acquia secures the OS, database, and web layers. Acquia also has a shared
responsibility model with the customer for securing the Drupal application layer.
Maintenance and optimization. The Acquia Cloud engineering team is responsible for
maintaining and optimizing the platform. The team takes care of all OS, database, and file system
updates and uses an agile development processes that enables rolling out new features or
enhancements every three weeks.
Monitoring. Acquia uses the Nagios monitoring platform to provide instant access to vital,
real-time, and historical metrics of the servers that it provisions in the AWS infrastructure. Based
on its expertise at managing systems resources for thousands of sites, Acquia has created a
system that monitors over 50 metrics, such as disk usage, CPU usage, memory usage, running
processes, and so on. Acquias monitoring systems use alerting and escalation to ensure that our
operations team is notified when alerts are generated. Acquia operations team members work
on three continents and respond to alerts 24x7. For security monitoring, Acquia uses OSSEC,
an open source, host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS). OSSEC, which performs realtime alerting and active responses, is used to detect brute force login attempts and to alert our
operations and security teams. We also routinely scan test instances of each cloud instance with
rapid7 and Qualys to ensure the platform is secure.

6 10 Layers of PaaS

At Acquia, scalability
doesnt mean adding
more capacity when
a site is under strain.
Its a combination of
three efforts: expert
sizing, preventative
capacity, and cloud
operations managed
elasticity.

A True Platform: Five

Layers of Application
Development with PaaS
With the core infrastructure components set, the application development pieces then come into
play. The remainder of the PaaS comprehensive offering should include capabilities for:
Continuous delivery. Acquia Cloud includes a continuous integration workflow environment
for development. This environment comes with separate pre-established development, staging,
and production environments. This platform is a full-featured offering that integrates with code
repositories, offers drag-and-drop code deployment, and incorporates testing across environments.
Customers can also build custom tests with cloud hooks by using our Cloud API. The environment
comes with activity logs and activity streams. This environment exists to ensure developers follow
continuous integration best practices of developing iteratively in small batches and always testing
before pushing code to production.
Application maintenance. Acquia actively maintains and enhances the development environment.
New features are released frequently and settings are tuned. Customers are encouraged to
recommend features to their account manager for consideration in Acquias product roadmap.
Optimization tools. All Acquia Cloud subscriptions include a variety of tools that either help test
and tune Drupal applications or extend the functionality on customers sites. Some of these tools
are built by Acquia, such as Acquia Insight, which analyzes Drupal code against performance,
security, and Drupal best practices criteria. Acquia also offers Acquia Search, which is a completely
hosted and maintained version of Apache Solr. Also included in Acquia Cloud subscriptions are free
trials of performance optimization tools, language translation solutions, and a variety of marketingfocused tools such as A/B testing and web analytics.
Application and infrastructure support services. Acquia Cloud includes world class application
and infrastructure support. Our Drupal support team members are experts in diagnosing Drupal
application issues, and our Cloud operations team is available 24x7x365 to review monitoring alerts,
see when a customers site is under strain, and help resolve issues quickly. To date, weve resolved
over 120,000 Drupal and cloud operations issues. Acquias collective expertise for Drupal and cloud
operations issue detection and resolution is unmatched.
Your custom code. Acquia Cloud customers are able to bring their custom code while we do the
rest. Theres a shared responsibility with AWS for application security, but otherwise Acquia, via
Acquia Cloud, takes responsibility for all of the other nine layers of PaaS.

7 10 Layers of PaaS

Compare Acquias PaaS

to Hosting Alternatives
ACQUIA CLOUD

ACQUIA CLOUD

TRADITIONAL
MANAGED
HOSTING

INTERNAL
HOSTING

DRUPAL TUNED STACK

MAYBE

DIY

MULTI-TIER CACHING
SUPPORT

DIY

DIY

SERVER SUPPORT

MAYBE

DISASTER RECOVERY

MAYBE

DIY

24x7 MONITORING

DIY

DIY

SECURITY

MAYBE

DIY

DRUPAL SUPPORT

DIY

DRUPAL MAINTENANCE

DRUPAL ADMINISTRATION

DIY

DRUPAL OPTIMIZATION
TOOLS

DRUPAL DEVELOPER
TOOLS

MAYBE

8 10 Layers of PaaS

Summary
Although this paper focuses on the 10 layers of PaaS, it could just as easily have been titled
Everything You Need for Web Development and Experience Delivery Success. What Acquia truly
enables is continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is an approach to automating and improving
the process of software delivery and is becoming increasingly popular in web development as the
speed of the web demands faster innovation.
Organizations that do not adopt continuous delivery processes and tools are effectively stealing
time away from the main focus: building great digital experiences. Instead, your technical staff is
fully occupied with tuning and testing the environments they use to build, deploy, and host your
site. In a recent report, Continuous Delivery Is Reshaping the Future of ALM, Forresters Kurt
Bittner writes Continuous delivery practices provide the means to replace the manual processes
and personal heroics associated with emergency fixes with a regular, controlled, and rapid
deployment pipeline.

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Building a system comparable to Acquia Cloud would take months, a significant staff, and
many thousands of dollars. Let Acquia reduce risk, take away a commoditized burden, and
complement your team with expertise and better tools. Give your application and operations team
the continuous delivery tools they need to stop putting out fires and start building and delivering
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9 10 Layers of PaaS
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