Pantheon, the all-in-one Drupal platform, today announced the launch of Multidev, which cuts website management costs by letting teams instantly provision unlimited development environments in the cloud. Multidev does for a company’s website what software-defined data centers do for its infrastructure. Each member of a team can fork the entire stack of services that power a site on demand, developing in tandem on a single platform. As a result, large websites launch faster and cost less to manage over time.  

Based on Pantheon’s multi-tenant containerized architecture, Multidev spins up in seconds, with no need for additional infrastructure or virtual servers. For managers, that means freedom from bugs introduced by outdated databases or platform fragmentation, and from hearing, “It worked on my machine” from their team.

For developers, the process is easy. A team member hits ‘fork’ to provision a complete cloud development environment in seconds. What used to require a separate rack of hardware, now happens in seconds via software. Whether developing, testing or handing off a stable copy of the site for review, there’s no risk of overwriting or losing data. Multidev supports feature-branching, per-developer sandboxes, dedicated quality assurance environments and more.

“With Multidev we’ve eliminated the big reasons behind website launch delays,” said Zack Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Pantheon. “Multidev delivers on the promise of a software-defined data center for website development. It gives users the ability to spin up an entire new web stack including database, caching and version control for every developer on demand. Now even extensive and complex sites can hit their launch targets.”