Laravel has raised a $57M Series A in partnership with Accel | Hacker News Reader

Laravel has raised a $57M Series A in partnership with Accel

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49 pointsdavidgomes26 comments

I haven't used Laravel, but I'm curious to know from those who have if Laravel Cloud [0] brings enough to the table to get excited about. The marketing on that wait-list page is... fluffy to say the least ("With Laravel Cloud, you’re not just deploying code, you’re embracing a future where infrastructure works for you, not the other way around"), and the benefits it lays out seem to be pretty standard fare serverless stuff already provided by any of the big clouds.

I've run PHP apps (but not Laravel apps) in production and the infrastructure and config never really occupied that much of my time. Is Laravel different in this way than running bare PHP? Is there a gap to fill here where existing cloud providers aren't?

[0] https://cloud.laravel.com/

It's not difficult at all to host a Laravel app. You just need to set it up once, which takes a maximum of 1 hour, and then you never have to touch it again. I worked on a Laravel app that, at its daily peak, had 25,000 concurrent users. It was running on 2 app servers, and Nginx was simply load balancing between the two. I never had to make any changes to it in 5 years.

Yeah, this was my experience with PHP and my understanding has been that Laravel makes it even easier by solving most of the complexity of bootstrapping the application. I'd have been surprised if it were harder!

Deployment is generally pretty easy, but there's still a lot of stuff an all-in-one cloud product could add:

  * Automatic Scaling
  * Additional processes like queue workers, crons, ...
  * Managing rollouts and rollbacks
  * Managed infra (database, cache, ...)
  * Multiple environments
  * Persistent storage
  * Backups
  * Monitoring and health checks
  * Logging and tracing
  * Software updates for the underlying server(s)
  * CDN
  * Failover and redundancy

Just to name a few.

Laravel Cloud is probably going to provide all of that out of the box. I think that could be attractive for a lot of people.

I've deployed a number of Laravel apps in both traditional and serverless architecture. I have to say I'm pretty excited about Laravel cloud. Not that deploying Laravel is hard, but for a full fledged app there's a number of moving parts that I'd rather not deal with.

Plus if you're building apps for clients handing off the whole hosting side of things sounds amazing.

I'm fairly excited too. It seems the target is "Vercel but for PHP" and the lack of a Vercel/Netlify-style deployment option has pretty consistently been used as an argument against using PHP/Laravel at my agency. I've already started seeing longtime Node/Typescript devs showing interest in Laravel and Laravel Cloud will likely only increase that.

Laravel already has multiple ways to deploy (other than rolling your own):

Laravel Forge - Deploys a VPS on your own AWS/DigitalOcean/Hetzner/etc - https://forge.laravel.com/

Laravel Vapor - Deploys a serverless function on your AWS account to run your app/cron/queues https://vapor.laravel.com

Laravel Cloud - Differs because it doesn't run on your infrastructure, so less time to setup/configure.

Maybe it makes sense from this angle:

Laravel forge - something breaks, you are responsible to fix it

Laravel vapor - something breaks, you are responsible to fix it

Laravel Cloud - something breaks and you can prove, that it's not you code? Someone else is responsible, awesome!

Most projects that use laravel are small shops. To sell them the convenience that they don't need to bother about infrastructure and uptime, is a smart move by laravel.

And envoyer

Congrats to the Laravel team, and Accel too! I feel they've got a winner on their hands.

Laravel has single handedly made PHP development cool again, and the way they did that was offering an integrated developer experience focused on ease of starting and quick productivity.

They flattened the learning curve of other "full" frameworks (like Django/Rails) by offering recommended (and official) tools and services out of the box. This cuts down a lot of the analysis paralysis faced by junior developers and they have an easy way to start adopting necessary complex tooling when it becomes relevant for them.

Have a look at the `Ecosystem` mentioned at https://laravel.com/ – Django doesn't have an official local development GUI or Rails doesn't have an official APM – which is a boon for power users that know how they want to setup their local development environment or what they want in an APM service, but they're exhaustingly complex choices for a web developer just getting started.

I've observed Laravel gain a tremendous following with developers here in India, I believe because of this ease of getting started and being productive quickly.

I don't even feel like the funding amount is ridiculous. For comparison, have a look at some of the funding raised by smaller frameworks/libraries (CMSes, "JAM Stack", etc) without such an extensive set of revenue making services, in the JS world.

If they continue to pour the money on expanding their ecosystem while staying true to their value proposition to developers, they will do great. I, for one, am looking forward to this next generation of PHP/Laravel-powered web (maybe even mobile with this funding?) products.

Happy for Taylor and the team I guess, but I feel like this can’t end well for end-users.

I know Laravel the company already has numerous paid offerings, but to date they’ve all been pretty reasonably priced and not really anything that locks you in. Should we expect this to change? I feel like we have to

I think of all people, Taylor deserves the benefit of the doubt. In his Q&A today, he was adamant that this was mostly a way to build more ambitious tools faster without risking his own capital (even though he probably could have paid for it all himself).

We've seen a similar playbook with Basecamp and their influx of cash from Bezos back in the day. Taylor really leans into the DHH philosophy of business/programming so I still think it's too early to take this as a "sell out".

That said, all good things come to an end. I hope Taylor will always have the decency to at least go out on good terms with the community and not let the whole thing just crash and burn because he sold off too much equity to bad faith investors.

The Bezos thing wasn’t really the same though. 37signals sold a minority stake to take money off the table, not to inject working capital.

Oh yeah, I don’t want to imply any ulterior motives for anyone involved.

I’m more just concerned that sooner or later the piper will want paying and things don’t always go so well from that point on.

Fortune Exclusive: https://fortune.com/2024/09/05/laravel-raises-57-million-ser...

https://archive.is/lUWnK

Accel invested in Sentry.io back in 2015. As of 2019, it's no longer open source software. Let's hope that the history will not be repeated

Sentry rocks and, in my opinion, is value priced.

It's still free to self host though

That explains the official closed source 150usd per project per year 20 component ui library they announced this week.

That was not from Laravel itself but from Caleb Porzio who created Livewire.

I know. Bad joke. But it still is an official Livewire thing and Livewire is prominently featured on Laravel website. And conspiracy theories are an official HN thing.

I'm really disappointed that Taylor decided to go the VC route. This never ends well for the community and the framework.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com