Since the early days of Acquia, the cloud has always been central to our vision. We “bet the farm” that it was the best way to deliver Open Source software to our customers.
At the time, both the cloud and Open Source software were still “fringe” ideas. Almost all companies used proprietary software hosted in on-premise data centers. Open Source and cloud were perceived as untested and risky.
In March 2006, Amazon released its AWS S3 and EC2 cloud services. A year later, we built the entire Acquia Drupal hosting platform on AWS.
In those early days, we spent a lot of time convincing customers that Open Source software delivered via the cloud was the right investment to make.
We were convinced we could build a new kind of company. That company had a new kind of business model, a new innovation model, all optimized for a new world. In this new world, businesses would move most applications into the cloud, where most software would become Open Source, where IT infrastructure would become a metered utility and where data-driven services would make or break business results.
Thirteen years later, almost all companies are building in the cloud using Open Source software. Developers have become powerful decision-makers. What was a risky bet in 2007 has become the de-facto standard for software development today.