Deploy Websites Fast with Acquia Cloud Site Factory

One of Drupal's strengths is its ability to support many sites with the same codebase. By adding a directory under Drupal's "sites" directory, you can install a new site with its own database. The benefit is you can manage one set of code instead of having codebases spread across servers. Drupal also allows the flexibility for users to create their own sites and settings without impacting existing sites.

Managing several sites at scale can be a challenge. You need direct access to the code to create a new site, to commit it to the repository, and to deploy its code. You'd also need to perform updates for each site when there's a new Drupal release, and the ability to rollback those updates if something happens. This process can be difficult to manage if you have busy development and marketing teams.

Support Multiple Sites with Acquia Cloud Site Factory

Acquia Cloud Site Factory makes supporting multiple Drupal sites easier. It does that by allowing you to create new sites and deploy them without a developer.

Consider the following scenarios:

• You're a state, city, or municipality that wants to provide departments with a way to create consistent websites
• You're a business with many locations or franchises that needs to create separate sites and provide control to specific teams
• You're higher ed institution that needs sites for your departments, groups, and student organizations
• You're a nonprofit that wants to spin up sites for different campaigns and initiatives
• You're a publisher that needs to create marketing sites for books, albums, games, or conferences

In all these situations, Site Factory fits right into your workflow, providing your teams with everything they need to succeed.

Deploy Sites Quickly with Site Factory

Site Factory's rapid site deployment takes advantage of Drupal's install profiles feature. Think of install profiles as "recipes." You can automatically say what modules to install and how to configure them. 

When a user creates a new site in Site Factory, they select from a list of install profiles. After a few minutes, the site is installed and configured. Then it's ready for users to start entering content.

Creating, testing, and tailoring install profiles can take time to get right. The benefit of install profiles is obvious though — Site Factory can create a new site in a few minutes. You have something that would normally take weeks or months of development available with a click.

>> Acquia Site Studio Empowers Content Marketers in Drupal

Perform Easy Updates and Maintenance

Site Factory comes with three environments (dev, stage, and production) for testing and training. It provides an administrative tool to control and schedule when to deploy code to these environments. You can also run update(s) at your discretion via Site Factory Cloud Hooks. These updates run for all sites at once, which saves you a lot of time in the deployment process. 

This process also allows you to test your updates ahead of time on lower environments. If you've ever had to manually update several sites, you know how helpful that can be. Whether you have 10 sites or 1,000 sites, Site Factory makes the process the same, so updates are much easier for you to manage.

Let's Talk About Site Factory

Velir is a trusted Acquia implementation partner and has extensive experience on the Acquia Cloud and Acquia Cloud Site Factory platforms. We can partner with you to help your organization deploy websites faster and get the most from your Drupal website.

Did you know you can combine Acquia Site Studio and Acquia Cloud Site Factory for rapid site creation with a great authoring experience across your organization? Get in touch for a demonstration and to see what we can do for you.