Acquia Intelligently and Automatically Improves Application Performance and Cost Efficiency with StormForge

Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions and help businesses stand out.

Challenge

In order to support customer requirements and optimize the performance, scalability and cost efficiency of its core hosting offering, Acquia decided to move to a Kubernetes container-based platform. 

“Our objective is to provide the best experience with Drupal, and that means that it has to run on a world-class platform,” explains Charley Dublin, Vice President of Product Management. “It has to provide high performance, be highly secure, and also be flexible enough to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run it – choice is key for Acquia, and our customers, and we want to be able to support choice on our platform.”

With this move, Acquia needed to be able to right-size resource capacity to support customer applications, while also scaling as needed based upon each application’s consumption requirements. However, without a way to automate the process, it would put a tremendous burden on resources, both in terms of gaining the expertise to support a new Kubernetes environment, and the number of resources needed to do this for every customer, every day, at scale. 

“We recognized that there was no viable path to do this manually,” says Dublin. “We assessed our options and StormForge quickly emerged as the ideal solution – the others didn’t provide the intelligence needed and wouldn’t be as effective in addressing our business’ needs.”

Solution

Leveraging StormForge, Acquia can automate the process of achieving and maintaining Kubernetes resource efficiency at scale. With the ability to forecast demand, and then make resource decisions around application configuration based upon the forecast, Acquia can manage customer applications and meet their evolving and dynamic application requirements. The platform also enables continuous scenario planning using machine learning to analyze the essentially infinite number of possible configurations to find the one that will minimize cost while ensuring performance that meets or exceeds expectations.

“With StormForge we can right-size resources to different kinds of applications, essentially letting the platform align to our customers,” explains Dublin. “Customers can get the performance that they want, when they need it, on demand, so they can run applications with the functionality and performance that meets their needs.”

Business Results and Benefits

Today, Acquia can benefit from pre-production optimization that lets the team go deep to fully understand system behavior to achieve peak efficiency. StormForge machine learning automatically explores and optimizes the resource configuration of applications before deployment to make it easier to identify trade-offs and make the right business decisions.

In addition to simplifying management so that the team can handle more applications, StormForge has also provided a sustainable, scalable, and operationally efficient way to manage performance and cost.

Acquia customers can also benefit from the company’s ability to automate Kubernetes resource efficiency by realizing increased performance, improved scalability, and the ability to meet their unique needs.

Looking Ahead

In the future, Acquia would like to take advantage of StormForge’s application performance testing and resource optimization to gain actionable insights in both production and pre-production. Building upon its experience with StormForge Optimize Pro in pre-production, Acquia is now in testing with StormForge Optimize Live for Kubernetes application testing and optimization that leverages existing data to deliver insights and optimization from observability and cost data already being collected. This eliminates the need to perform massive data aggregation and maintain additional infrastructure, which would free up Acquia resources to focus on what matters the most – the customer’s experience. 

“At the end of the day we want insights to manage our platform and provide better services and value for our customers – that’s core to our business,” says Dublin. “StormForge will be a game changer for Acquia. It allows us to keep pace in a rapidly moving and highly competitive market while enabling us to accelerate the value we deliver to customers. We expect that StormForge will help us get to where we want to go as a business – faster and better.”