Website Management Platform
A website management platform is an integrated set of tools and services allowing teams to build, launch, and manage websites. This all-in-one solution is a big step up from the status quo of generic cloud platforms, self-hosting, and cowboy DevOps.
Website development looks increasingly like software development. It’s agile, it’s iterative, it often involves collaborators all over the world, and it’s often shipped as SaaS. You need a tool that keeps your team productive and makes launching a slam-dunk, even under high stress and heavy loads.
Container Platform
Pantheon runs on a distributed, horizontally scalable infrastructure with no single points of failure. Using Pantheon means never having to say the word “server” again. Your website runs on an architecture built with containers rather than physical or virtual machines.
Pantheon’s platform runs over a million Linux containers pushing out billions of pageviews a month. Along with the ability to handle almost any amount of traffic, the platform provides operational agility that simply can’t be found elsewhere.
As a result, you can launch new sites and scale them at any time. You no longer have to worry about your campaigns succeeding beyond your expectations. You have zero lag in getting a new team member a development environment.
Your website is a modern application, so if your website platform doesn’t have these attributes, you should ask why.
Automation
If you can automate infrastructure management, you should. Manual work at any stage of a platform’s configuration, deployment, or maintenance introduces the risk of costly human errors and tribal knowledge build-up.
Pantheon completely automates the infrastructure layer. It also allows site developers to automate many of their own processes via command-line or RESTful API. Workflow streamlining and automated testing allow web teams to improve both quality and velocity, ultimately reaching the pinnacle of continuous delivery.
Workflow and Version Control
Websites present a unique challenge because they combine both code and content. Any professional software project should include version control. But a website management platform has to do more.
Pantheon’s version control creates a stable, standardized deployment workflow for releasing changes. It allows you to perform quality assurance and testing with coordinated changes to the website's code, with the current state of live content.
Effective development work also requires the ability to easily synchronize content from the live environment. This workflow allows teams to work against an accurate picture of reality, so they can develop features at high velocity.
Finally, all team members must have access their own development environments. Like a runway, the deployment process should always be kept clear for approved changes to take off. A feature-branch workflow is the best way for developers to maximize productivity while never getting in the way, and Pantheon makes this effortless.
Developer Console
Keeping the whole team on the same page means having real-time access to the state of a project. Pantheon delivers this by making the developer console available to all team members via a user-friendly, real-time web interface.
This truly allows you to keep track of all your sites in one place. Every site, every development environment, every team member, every deploy. It means transparency and access for your developers and project managers alike, and an end to confusion and misunderstandings.
Website CMS
In contrast to a generic platform, a commodity cloud infrastructure, or legacy style hosting, Pantheon is optimized for the CMS software powering more and more of today’s websites. This includes specific runtime and environment configurations, the ability to get a new instance up and running, as well as keeping the software secure and up to date over time.
Pantheon supports both of the leading Open Source CMS solutions, Drupal and WordPress. Both enjoy the complete support of our platform, console, automation, and workflow tools.