By Tara King April 14, 2020
Update 5/24/2021: This offer will be available through June 30, 2021.
Update 11/19/2020: We are extending this offer due to the ongoing impacts of Covid-19. Please connect with you account manager if you have further questions. Previous references to a December 1st end date throughout this post have been updated.
We know teams are working under challenging conditions right now, and the last thing you need is to develop a new workflow from scratch while also dealing with a pandemic. So, to help out, we’re offering Multidev, one of our most powerful collaboration tools, free of charge. This offer extends to all customers and partners, regardless of whether you have a contract and what level of support you have. In fact, it’s already enabled on your Pantheon account!
I used Multidev at my first agency job and I’ve loved it ever since. I was working with a remote team, and this extension of Pantheon’s Dev/Test/Live workflow was a lifeline that let me test my changes and work in the open, without spending so much time fretting over a local environment.
What is Multidev?
Multidev expands the capabilities of our beloved WebOps workflow by allowing developers to create multiple cloud development environments on-demand. Each environment is an independent, identically configured and resourced version of your site, where you can get to work right away.
Each Multidev environment corresponds with a git branch on your project. With the click of a button, every new git branch you push to the server will have its own, fully provisioned cloud environment. By forking the entire stack, a developer can get to work without fussing over local configuration. From there, the Pantheon dashboard makes it easy to clone the database and files from one environment to another, keeping the Multidev environments up-to-date as needed.
How Multidev Drives Collaboration
As you might imagine, dedicated cloud environments for each developer on your team prevents a lot of friction in the development process. These environments can be used for anything: applying security updates, building new features, running automated tests, reviewing with stakeholders before going live, or even training new team members.
Each environment has a dedicated URL, so you don’t have to push up to Dev to show your colleagues what you’ve been building. It’s a quick and easy way to demonstrate new features when you can’t be in the same room together.
Multidev unblocks web teams to move fast and deploy with confidence by providing consistent, on-demand, fully-functional development instances of their sites in the cloud. Because each environment is consistent with Live, you also don’t have to worry about deployment surprises, and you’ll banish the phrase, “It worked on my machine,” from your team’s communications.
With the ability to have many of these environments at once, your team can now work on multiple things in parallel. This is one of the key reasons WebOps can more than double web team productivity.
Our Offer to Organizations on the COVID-19 Frontline
In addition to offering Multidev to all customers on the platform, we are offering free site plans to any organization on the front line of the COVID-19 crisis. Government, medical, or educational institutions who run a crisis communications website, or a non-profit organization directly providing relief, are eligible to receive the full service of our WebOps platform at no charge through the ongoing impacts of Covid-19.
Next Steps
Ready to get started? Multidev is already enabled on your account. Simply log into your Pantheon Dashboard and click on the ‘Multidev’ tab—you’ll find it to the left of the “Dev” tab.
See our documentation for instructions to get started and watch Tara King and Pantheon Hero Duran Goodyear in the Multidev Access for All webinar to get up to speed. In the webinar, Duran Goodyear discusses how his team uses Multidev to accelerate development and Tara King provides a live demo of Multidev in action.
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Topics: WebOps
