Drupal is now in the cloud!

Okay, we have our first Acquia Drupal installation in our cloud. Now working through some important configuration/backend information architecture decisions that will likely affect all we do going forward with Drupal. One of the biggest and actually most basic decisions we've made is whether to have one master drupal installation/MySQL database to run all 80-odd sites we manage or to have one master installation of Drupal with 70-odd separate sites (subdomains) each with their own "installation profile" of Drupal and their own MySQL database. The latters seems to be the best choice for us for many reasons:

• keeping them separate allows for modular testing and implementing of modules and tweaks per site rather than having to implement something across sites when perhaps only a few need the feature
• separate databases means, in theory, better performance
• although this makes sharing of content among the sites more challenging, it seems that Drupal allows ways for separate MySQL tables (DBs) to communicate with each other - or, we simply use RSS to get structured XML between sites - either way, it's doable and seems preferable over having one master database, especially from the individual webmaster of each of our sites' perspective
• etc.

So, for now, we're playing around with our Acquia Drupal installation and installing some basic modules:

• views module
• devel module
• cck module
• installation profiles
• others?

and getting a feel for how to map what we've been doing in Dreamweaver and our other various and sundry systems (Java, JBoss, etc.) onto the corresponding "node" in the Drupal universe. The use of the word "node" there is a slight play-on-words - Drupal uses the term node to refer to anything stored in it's database...