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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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

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.

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