October 29, 2010
1 min read time

Speedy Acquia

Performance and speed are really an obsession for us here at Varnish Software. And Acquia, our latest partner, is on the same track.

First some background. Acquia is a somewhat unique company. They call themselves your Drupal guide. Their primary activity is not to develop Drupal, but to be a pure commercial company backing Drupal for commercial uses. Most of the actual Drupal development is done by the community around Drupal. Of all the open source CMS I know Acquia is probably the one with the strongest community. The community decides where Drupal goes, not Acquia. I can't say I've seen any other company that has managed to pull this off. Kudos to them. Really.

If you are launching a new website today, you should definitively be using Acquia to host it. They will guarantee a problem-free deployment and maintenance of Drupal. From our own experience, Drupal can be quite heavy to maintain and unless you have skilled PHP programmers on your staff I'm not sure if I would recommend building a critical site on Drupal without their assistance. Acquias team of Drupal experts are there to assist you with complete Drupal application stacks, offering the simplicity and confidence that comes with one number to call with questions about a Drupal website.

Today, Acquia and Varnish work together as technology partners. This means faster Drupal websites and better performance, from now on. From Drupal 7 and onwards Drupal and Varnish will go hand in hand guaranteeing a speedy experience. I should mention that whilst waiting for D7 you should have a look at Drupal pressflow, which works out of the box (I know, I installed both varnish-cache.org and varnish-software.com with Drupal Pressflow).

Boston Training Class

For anyone in the Boston area, we invite you to attend the Varnish Training Class we are hosting at Acquia´s offices next Monday and Tuesday (Nov 1 - 2). It's taught by senior Varnish engineer, Kristian Lyngstøl, and goes quite deep on how to configure Varnish. Check it out and register hereunder:

http://www.varnish-software.com/products-services/training/varnish-admin...