DevPanel for Drupal
Bring your own cloud
DevPanel runs Drupal inside your own AWS, Azure or DigitalOcean account. You keep the cloud contract, the data, the region and the exit route. DevPanel provides the orchestration layer that makes it as easy as a managed platform — without the platform markup.
75–80%
Lower hosting cost
Reported by customers
Your
Cloud account
Contract, credentials, region
$0
Export fee
No lock-in by design
How it fits together
Your Drupal applications
Drupal 10 or 11, one site or a portfolio, headless or traditional
DevPanel orchestration
Dev / Test / Live workflows, Git deployments, environment cloning, Redis, Varnish, CDN, backups, patching
Your cloud account
AWS, Azure or DigitalOcean — your contract, your credentials, your bill, your region
Disconnect the middle layer and the top layer keeps running in the bottom layer. That is what "no lock-in" means in practice.
Four differences
01
DevPanel provisions Dev, Test and Live environments inside your own AWS, Azure or DigitalOcean account. You hold the contract, the billing relationship and owner-level credentials. DevPanel holds delegated access it can be asked to give back.
02
The application runs on a standard Drupal runtime. If you disconnect the orchestration layer, the sites, databases and files keep running in your account. There is no export fee and no proprietary runtime to unwind.
03
You pay your cloud provider directly, at your own committed rates, and apply the credits and enterprise discounts you already have. DevPanel customers report 75–80 per cent lower hosting costs than legacy managed Drupal platforms.
04
Dev, Test and Live workflows, Git-based deployment, environment cloning, automated SSL, Redis, Varnish, CDN and backups are orchestrated for you, without a DevOps hire and without hiding the infrastructure.
RFP language
These are vendor-neutral: any supplier could answer them, and the answers will tell you whether you are buying infrastructure or a dependency. They happen to describe how DevPanel is built, which is not the same as naming DevPanel.
The proposed hosting model must allow [Organization] to continue operating the production platform without the supplier's orchestration tooling. The supplier must describe, in the proposal, the steps required to do so and any residual dependency.
Vendor-neutral. A managed PaaS cannot answer it honestly; an orchestration layer in your account can answer it precisely.
Production infrastructure must be provisioned in a cloud account contracted and owned by [Organization]. The supplier may hold delegated administrative access, but [Organization] must retain owner-level credentials, the billing relationship and the right to revoke access at any time.
This is the single clause that most changes the commercial shape of a Drupal contract. It also happens to be how DevPanel is designed.
Infrastructure charges must be identified separately from management and support fees. Where infrastructure is resold, the underlying cost and the markup percentage must be disclosed. Pass-through charges must be supported by provider invoices available on request.
Ask every bidder for a specimen invoice. The answer tells you more about the next five years than the build price does.
On termination, the supplier must deliver all code, configuration, content, media and database exports in standard formats, together with infrastructure documentation sufficient for a successor provider to operate the platform, at no additional charge and within [30] days.
Write it, then watch which vendors negotiate it. A refusal is the clearest signal in the whole process.
The supplier must provide on-demand creation of isolated development and staging environments from the production codebase, including a sanitised database refresh, within [4] hours of request and without a change request.
A capability test rather than a promise: vendors either have a control plane that does this or they do not.
The arithmetic
Managed platforms resell cloud infrastructure with a margin built into the price. When the account is yours, the margin disappears — and your existing cloud commitments and credits start counting towards the bill.
Managed Drupal platform
$1,000 / month illustrative
Roughly $150–200 of that is the underlying cloud infrastructure. The remainder is platform margin, support and tooling, bundled and undisclosed.
DIY cloud (no orchestration)
$150–200 / month infrastructure
Cheap on the invoice and expensive in engineering time: hardening, patching, backups, monitoring and on-call become your team's work.
Orchestration in your own cloud
$150–200 / month infrastructure + flat platform fee
You keep the automation and lose the markup. For portfolios of sites the difference compounds, because infrastructure is consolidated rather than priced per site.
Illustrative figures for comparison, not a quote. Real costs depend on traffic, data volume, region and the services you enable. Ask for a three-year total cost of ownership in the format in section 12 of the RFP template.
Questions
No, and that is the point. DevPanel provisions and manages the environments inside your own AWS, Azure, or DigitalOcean account. You hold the cloud contract and the root credentials; DevPanel provides the orchestration layer, dashboards, pipelines and environment automation on top.
It keeps running in your account. Because the resources are yours, disconnecting the orchestration layer does not move or delete the sites, databases or files, and there is no export fee or migration penalty written into the model. Your team or another partner can continue operating the same environment.
Traditional managed Drupal platforms resell cloud infrastructure with a platform markup built into the price. DevPanel charges for orchestration while infrastructure is billed to you directly by your cloud provider at list or committed rates, so the markup disappears and existing cloud commitments and credits can be applied.
The model is often easier to justify than a walled platform, because data stays in the buyer's own account and jurisdiction. DevPanel publishes compliance documentation for review and supports configurations used by government, healthcare, higher-education and nonprofit buyers. Confirm the specific framework you need against the current documentation before you write it into the RFP.
Next step
Bring your current hosting bill and your infrastructure requirements. DevPanel can show you what the same platform costs inside your own cloud account, and what the exit clause would actually require.