Acquia out of beta

Yes, that was the question as in the header of style.css it is written "copyright 2008 Collective Mind".

This theme is one of the best GPL theme for Drupal I have seen so far. So congratulations again to all the teams involved in it.

By the way, I had also some time to play with Drupal Acquia (screenshots) and I think I will use it, combined with a network account for my in progress project as it is a real productivity tool at every step (installation, maintenance) of the process.

Here, I can really see how it can help grow Drupal and the community...

One improvement area though : are you going to provide full translation (french, deutsh, italian,...) of the distibution in the near future

Alex
http://www.ineation.com

Could be. I don't know how much of a profitable market there is for "low-end commercial support". It may well be that Acquia misjudged the size of that market and will miss a lot of people. If so, then either they will eventually open up new offerings to support those users or someone else will, and that other company will make lots of money instead of Acquia.

Honestly, I'm happy either way. I personally hope that Acquia does well in the market, well enough to attract a few competitors that enter the same or similar market segments. A healthy "coopitition" in the support market, just as there is in the development market, would be quite healthy for Drupal just as having a number of major Linux distribution vendors is healthy for the Linux world.

And we still have Drupal.org as the definitive "Drupal Standards Base"; no need to bolt it on afterwords like the LSB. :-)

Welcome aboard, Acquia!

--
Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog
http://www.palantir.net

Hi haas,

If people do get confused and place things in the wrong directories, the Acquia Network will be a big help to them. There is an automatic change detection feature that keeps track of what code is where, and whether it is in the right place. This is one of the big values Acquia hopes to bring to people.

- Robert Douglass

-----
my Drupal book

> For the 2-3 server cluster and the other plans, how is the subscription different from a single server subscription plan?

Acquia is supporting those environments and charging per server in those cases because of the increased complexity. We're on the hook to support Acquia Drupal running on clusters once it's set up and running. We're not on the hook to architect it or to do performance tuning.

> Does Acquia help in setting up for load balancing or otherwise?

It's outside the area of our support. But we are working on developing partners who could offer those services. We would be happy to talk directly with you, contact me or you can email sales@acquia.com and we will work to meet your needs.

Cheers,
Kieran

From what I can gather, the community is going to be the same. There will be people new to Drupal and experts at both forums, at Drupal.org and at Acquia site. However, the only benefit likely is that there may be official representative at Acquia replying and you can be sure about their advise.

As I too am evaluating about using Acquia, the other benefit that I see is that one can be sure that there is interoperability between modules. I mean, on Drupal.org, I may just add another module which may in turn break the other already-installed modules. So with Acquia, I am sure what is recommended is tested and that it will not break anything. Although then again, we do not experiment on production server, so we may anyway know if something breaks.

As far as community, Drupal has advantage too in the sense that site is quite old and we can just search if someone already had previous issue and how it was resolved. So both have pros and cons and I am just observing both.

However, I really want to know if at some stage I was to go back and install Drupal, will there be migration or something or is it going to break everything to point of no return.

Thanks.

As you mentioned, Acquia Drupal releases will be designated as Interim Release (IS) or Long Term Support (LTS) releases. Interim releases may include security updates and bug fixes or other relatively minor updates. LTS releases will be a designated set of modules that we commit to support for three years, or four years with our Extended Support option. If you are running an IS release, and you have an issue known to be resolved in the subsequent LTS release, then support will require that you upgrade to the LTS release. In other words, we won't fix it in the interim release if it's already fixed in the LTS release. Support may also require an upgrade to the next LTS release if they believe it will facilitate diagnosis and troubleshooting. We understand the effort and risks involved with every upgrade and will not require it unless it's a reasonable and logical course of action.

Kent Gale

That's certainly one possibility, but I believe the Acquia forums are only free for the next few months.

So, for the next few months we may see a small dropoff, but I kind of doubt it. The forums here are still currently and, especially with the redesign, will likely continue to be the de facto home of all Drupal discussion. Part of Acquia's mission is to dramatcally increase the Drupal user base. Some of the people that are brought into the project by Acquia's marketing will just join the regular forums and not subscribe to Acquia's service. So...overall the impact of Acquia may actually be an increased amount of discussion here on the drupal.org forums.

This isn't a simple situation...understanding all of the final implications is hard to do. I'm personally a very skeptical person, but am guardedly optimistic about the impact that Acquia will have on the free drupal.org + drupal core parts of the project.

--
_{Growing Venture Solutions | Drupal Dashboard | Learn more about Drupal - buy a Drupal Book}

Those who have enough money will buy services at Acquia.
Despite the verbosity and lots of faq it seems ( I may be wrong ) there will be some services or solutions which are *similar* and not belonging to water tight compartments between Acquia, Drupal paid services and Drupal.org.

Those who have not enough money to buy services at Acquia will pursue Drupal.org :)

If there are two different forums both free of cost for Acquia and Drupal.org ( I am not sure if these are the same forums or different forums or two different forums with complete water-tight topics domain ) there will be choices, I guess, to the user.

As RKC has said above :

the only benefit likely is that there may be official representative at Acquia replying and you can be sure about their advise.

If that be so some / many will like to take that benefit.

There are and there has been comparison with Linux and its various commercial distros.
However there are only 4 or 5 operating system widely used ( MS windows, Linux, Mac OS, BSD etc )
while there are actually more than one dozen ( if not more than 50 or more ) CMSes who have good userbase, constant development and **not** following the linux model so far eg. geeklog, e107 etc etc. So ultimately it will be the user's choices I think.

One part of the GPL I find somewhat uncomfortable is that many module makers ( who have made Drupal Drupal ) do not make money ( it has been said somewhere that can kill the spirit of free contributions to the wide community ) but with their products some people make money :)
GPL does guarantee this and perhaps there is very good logic for this and very effective outputs also. This is nothing related to Drupal or Acquia but somewhat I cannot shake off this uncomfortableness :)

I don't see anything wrong here in Acquia's business model. Acquia has even been forthcoming in saying that they will release 100% of code improvements to the community.

It is a natural process in FOSS to have some company (or companies) take on the role as 'Go To' company. If there are loose ends, the ecosystem will evolve automatically.

Future Community responses in d.o forums can be(some may even use contact us tab more now on) :

1) I can help you and here is why.. or here is the solution to your problem
2) Goto Company 'A' for support if you have X budget
3) Goto Company/Group 'B' for support if you have Y budget
4) There is another active forum at http://www.example.com where this issue has been addressed.

This Company Group 'B', 'C', 'D' can be separate companies or groups. One thing that I am not sure how this will turn out is whether people will share solutions on d.o or just directly use contact us form.

Currently drupal community of freelancers, service providers, clients, individuals post their queries and solutions freely on d.o for their own interest and for everyone and almost everyone searches for answers first on d.o before trying to spend time to fix and post response. This may change as more groups try and create their own space in Drupal ecosystem.

People are always resistant to change and generally have uncomfortable feeling whenever this happens. So long as the change is not gain for one and loss for other, and create new opportunities people usually welcome that change.

Roshan

[Still working on this]

First, let me say that the Acquia guru's do a lot of Acquia's engineering work here on drupal.org where they work closely with the development community.

I find it helps to look at some of the numbers behind the contributors to see the real diversity. There have been 7 or more Drupal maintainers. There are 5 active Drupal core maintainers in the Drupal project right now. Dries and Gabor work for Acquia. Gerhard (Drupal 4.7), Neil (Drupal 5), Angie (Drupal 7) do not. There is good diversity among the Drupal maintainers.

There were over 700 contributors to Drupal 6. Here's a blog post detailing Acquia's code contributions to the Drupal project. You can see that while we have an impressive team, what's really impressive is the Drupal community which has orders of magnitude more contributors.

You are right that some people will turn to Acquia for support. But to put things in perspective, there were over 9000 unique contributors to project issues and forums in the first 10 months of 2007. The community around Drupal.org is strong and diverse and is growing. Acquia provides a valuable option for users and organizations who need commercial support, but we aren't aiming to replace the diversity and breadth of the Drupal community. We couldn't do it if we tried. To be specific, there is over 4000 Drupal 5 modules supported by the Drupal community.

Acquia's success is closely tied to ensuring the Drupal community grows, remains diverse, vibrant, and open.

Cheers,
Kieran

That's not how I read Acquia's effect at all.

Currently with Drupal's many support channels (forums, issue queue, IRC, mailing lists, etc.) you can go online any time day or night (in whatever your timezone) and stand a reasonably good chance of having your question answered in a reasonable amount of time, assuming you are polite and ask your question in a way that people are able to answer. If it's not IRC then it may take a few hours for someone to respond, but that's the nature of the Internet.

For most people and uses, that's sufficient, and the price is right. I don't get paid to answer Drupal support questions, but I'm frequently around IRC helping someone with a Drupal coding problem. However, I make no guarantee to be online at any given time, or that I'll have time to talk to you, or that I'll be in a mood to answer your question for the 4th time, or that I won't up and leave in the middle of the conversation because I'm going to dinner.

For many companies, however, that's not sufficient. They do need someone they can call on the phone who they know will be there, and who they know will delay dinner to answer their question for the 4th time. And they are willing to pay a premium to know that they can interrupt someone's dinner (or get direct access to someone for whom it is not dinner time) when they have a question and need an answer on a deadline. That's a service that virtually no one is willing to provide free of charge. I rather value my dinner time. :-)

Those companies are Acquia's target market. That doesn't make everyone else second class citizens; I don't expect Drupal's community-based support to suddenly disappear. In fact I predict there won't be much of a change in at at all because of Acquia. (The site redesign effort will hopefully improve it, but that's totally independent.)

As someone who values his dinner (and does get paid to work on Drupal by a company other than Acquia), I'm very happy to see Acquia in the market. It's an important market segment and I'm happy to see someone fill it, especially a company populated by so many people that I know personally and completely trust to be good citizens about it.

--
Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog
http://www.palantir.net

The community or more specifically the creators and module writers will not make money for the labor they have put over years, but then as already pointed GPL does create that type of environment.

You might want to consider the existing Drupal economy:
Almost 1500 job postings: http://groups.drupal.org/jobs?page=28
In the paid services forum there are 13303 request for paid work.

I am not sure if you are implying that the existing contributors to the Drupal project are not being paid, but you might want to consider those 14500 requests to pay for Drupal services when making statements about contributions to the Drupal project.

Cheers,
Kieran

[Updated] Here's how we count servers: http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-frequently-asked-questions#se...

Cheers,
Kieran

We charge per Acquia Drupal instance, which you might think of as the tables Drupal installs in a database. Here is how Acquia define's the server count: http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-frequently-asked-questions#se...

To give you an example, let's take Drupal.org: http://drupal.org and http://groups.drupal.org. They are two Drupal sites, but both under the drupal.org domain. If groups were at drupal.org/groups instead, we would still look to see if it was a separate Drupal instance.

As you know, there are many permutations of how to set up a Drupal site. Multi-site, multiple sites, shared user tables, shared user authentication, shared node tables, etc. For these kinds of advanced configurations, we would want to look to how you would use your support and network services.

Our network services would be running cron and running a heartbeat on a single Drupal instance. When you file support tickets our support team is going to need to look to see what parts of the Acquia Drupal code you are running and that is going to be measured per Drupal instance. If you were running Acquia Drupal on your main site, but hacked core on your sub-site, we need to be able to tell you hacked core before we provide support for that separate instance.

We understand that one of the reasons people love Drupal is that they can customize it. If you have questions, that aren't addressed in our FAQ then don't hesitate to contact sales@acquia.com so we can address your questions.

Thanks for your interest in Acquia's products.

Cheers,
Kieran

Software update management:
So update is NOT done automatically, provided one has left such a DEFAULT option ON ?
Is managment only notifications and action buttons ??
if its automatic, the payee can devote more attention to actual site and contents.
BTW, does Acquia not have its own image upload-place to hyperlink ? It looks unprofessional for a commercial company to use other services unless Skitch is owned by Acquia already :)

System profile management
Sorry, I do not see what it "manages". Does it prevent cases like $6000 bills ?

Mollom
I did not doubt its efficacy. I meant to ask is the core Drupal ( as available on drupal.org ) so insecure and so vulnerable 'as it is' to spam attacks ? Should this 'insecurity' be not covered at core level, even if any other cms does not do it at core ?

Remote cron activation
Site usage statistics
Not finding really how uniquely this is done by Acquia except the Mollom stats.
Most ded servers now come with managed options so remote cron is already a part of the payment made there.

Should be http://www.acquia.com/downloads

Roshan
--
http://www.gloscon.com
Drupal and Ruby on Rails Specialists

Dave,

There are references to working with partners in following links

http://drupal.org/node/315151#comment-1038635
http://drupal.org/node/315151#comment-1038602
http://drupal.org/node/315151#comment-1041381

It doesn't matter whether it is this thread or somewhere else. I feel that the thread is now getting too commercial and if needed, I am open to participating in discussion somewhere else.

I just wanted few clarifications on partner program. For me the answers to my queries are important since it will help us decide whether we will consider signing up for partner program - whether now or in future.

-
Roshan Shah

Actually it will not take that amount of hours depending on how many sites one is serving ( for example 4 or 5 sites, nothing much of a hassle to do the updates etc )
I am no biggie and my actual "income" domain is not computer-related :)
BTW, doing innovative features vary from site to site but setting up routine things like checking updates or setting cron etc are 'routine' things, takes very little time once you have developed a pattern and that pattern can be applied the same way to different individual sites. ( Of course considering there are only a few sites in my booty and not hundreds )

I understand why Drupal must need an "earning" wing. Its profession for many of you while its just passion/hobby for me !

When it was Drupal 1 or 2 or say 3 no one ever thought the need for Acquia. As someone gave the example of Redhat, things 'grow'. The more you are open the faster you grow. One day, it may be months or years, either you or some people will be serving combo-solutions with clients having to attend ONLY one window !

I did download the free Acquia and did a test run :) . However, as advertised as "Build social publishing sites quickly" it lacks many things one may wish to make a social (network) site. These are separate issue and I do have many issues as well as explanatory diagrams ( in drupal issue lists ) But instead of empty words I am trying hard to make a package to show what I mean ( nothing new but just meaningful assembly of what is already there like APK, OG etc - yes, free, with no commercial inclination ) . It is actually almost done but based on 5.10. Next step is 6x. If you have studied the commercial market there is actually much much more money in selling social networking solutions, which is what phpfox, socialengine, dzoic is doing in part more logically than drupal but overall very infantile and feature-scanty in comparison to Drupal. Now comparing with those or bringing up those do not mean anything derogatory to drupal. I only mean to say there has been a shift from pure cms to social-net flavored cms ( vbb, invision all are doing this deviating from forum-only norms ). And with this shift more and more people will look forward to single-window solution for snw-s so that they do not have to worry about cpu resources, bandwidth, updates, module incompatibiliities BUT just they can look after their actual site contents more or spend more energy towards advertising for the site more or getting more members by organizing real life events etc. Surely Acquia is already having heavy-paying corporate clients but collectively these "mass" users have MUCH more and much heavier paying power.

OK ... this is getting unduly lengthy. Stopping here.

Best regards

Hi xxiao, thanks for taking the time to provide thoughtful feedback. We are starting to see patterns in the feedback we are getting. Some of your feedback addresses part of those patterns. Drupal users expect that Acquia Drupal will behave like Drupal, and that means that cron and the heartbeat messages are surprising. We have heard that feedback and are working to inform new users of Acquia Drupal to expect that cron and the heartbeat service will run by default. We also need to better advise you during installation how to disable cron from the network settings.

From the Acquia Network click on the Settings Tab, then the Cron tab, then select NO under "Do you want Acquia to run cron for you?". You can see an example screenshot on page 34 of the Getting Started Guide.

Acquia Drupal offers two other important benefits that you've not indicated you tried, and we hope you will try them out.

1. Our goal is to provide world class support. Some of the additional network services like heartbeats, code modification detection, and update notification are very complementary while receiving support. We will take your feedback and try to improve how these network services stand on their own without support.
2. Update notification. You are correct that Drupal.org's update notification service will provide you with notifications of releases. But do they do tell you if your contributed modules will work together if you upgrade them? It is that confidence for you and maybe your customers, that an Acquia subscription will provide a larger footprint of tested contribute modules and themes. If you do find a problem, then Acquia will provide support and our engineering teams will provide the fix and make it available to you through the Acquia network. We will also contribute that fix back to the contributed module maintainer.

We believe that a world class supported Acquia Drupal site with a supported road map are very valuable. Hopefully, you'll give those benefits of an Acquia subscription a shot at some point in the near future.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, we really appreciate it and we are working hard to improve and meet your expectations.

Cheers,
Kieran