Hi All,
Wondering if anyone has any experience/opinions on Pantheon vs. Rackspace managed cloud for running high performance Drupal?
My initial thoughts are that Pantheon probably offers the superior developer experience for Drupalers, but Rackspace likely has more flexibility in terms of backend configuration at a server level for real experts (as well as being slightly cheaper?).
Unfortunately for me, Pantheon doesn't yet have servers in Australia although I'm told this is in their long term expansion plans. I can use the local CDN to serve statics at least.
I think for someone like me (working knowledge of terms/concepts but little practical experience) Pantheon is probably the better choice, but am very interested to see what some experts think.
BC
Comments
Have you checked out Acquia?
Have you checked out Acquia? They have offices in AU so I bet the service is available there, and in terms of product offerings they're pretty similar to Pantheon. We have a lot of clients on Acquia and a lot of clients on Pantheon.
Acquia definitely offers full
Acquia definitely offers full hosting in Australia. We use the AWS Sydney data centre. Further in the APAC region we offer hosting in Singapore as well.
The full self-service details are at: https://www.acquia.com/cloud-pricing.
If you want to kick the tyres you can go to: https://insight.acquia.com/free and get a completely free dev account. Just pick the Sydney data centre as your region and in a few minutes you will have a full developer environment with Dev & Staging. It offers git, Drush integration, SSH key security, 500mb of storage, Insight analysis, Mollom spam protection, Solr and other stuff :)
Ping me and I would be happy to discuss further. I am on the Solution Architecture team and located in Brisbane.
Cheers,
David
Hi, I work as part of the
Hi, I work as part of the Australian contingent at Acquia (specifically Canberra). We're currently running a number of Australian customer sites out of the AWS Sydney datacentre so latency within the country is kept to a minimum.
If you're interested in learning some more about some of the offerings Acquia has within Australia please do reach out and I'll put you in contact with someone who'll be able to run you through everything.
Answering the question
Hey Brad,
I can see the Acquia contingent has chimed in so you're aware that they've got a footprint in oz, but I thought I'd answer the core of your question about Pantheon vs Rackspace's Managed Cloud.
They're really apples and oranges. Rackspace Managed Cloud is just a way to get virtual servers, and have Rackspace take responsibility for OS upgrades and some system configuration. In my experience they don't deal with "application configuration", meaning they'll insure that PHP is installed and up to date, but not that it is tuned for Drupal. They're also not really going to help you scale or run high-performance services (e.g. Redis, Varnish, Solr, etc). Their management piece is really about keeping your OS secure, and helping you respond to cloud failures.
Pantheon, conversely, is a all-in-one platform to build, launch and run websites. Within a few minutes of signing up, you'll have Drupal running, with version control, a workflow, team management, and all the bells and whistles on the stack. While it's true there's no flexibility to handle the system configuration, there's also no need to do any work, and since we run 1000s of big sites (billions of pageviews) on our platform, we pretty much have everything dialed.
Ultimately, the best way to see is to see. It's truly free to use as a developer (no trial period or credit card required), so if you have 20 minutes check it out.
https://dashboard.getpantheon.com/register
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
Thanks for weighing in everyone!
Plenty of food for thought here so far. I'll definitely try out both solutions and try to draw a conclusion as to which will be best for the particular application I have in mind.
Team Acquia, would you be able to point me towards some sites that are hosted on the Sydney servers? I'd like to see how the page load times compare to some of the Pantheon sites.
I'll also do some testing of my own and report back on my findings.
One other thing...
Suppose I had an app that required say, a server to run nodeJS for instant chat or some such purpose, would that be possible using Acquia or Pantheon?
How might a customer go about that kind of thing?
Ta.
Not (yet) on Pantheon
Pantheon only supports PHP runtimes at the moment, though we use Node a fair bit internally and can clearly see the value in having an add-on that facilitates real-time data like that.
You could run your own small instance (possibly adjacent in the same datacenter) to host node, or use one of the many push-notifications cloud services that are out there. (e.g. http://pusher.com/ )
Hope that helps!
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
Same as Pantheon here. Acquia
Same as Pantheon here. Acquia currently only supports PHP on the server but we are also looking at making other technologies available on our platform (Q4'ish).