Laravel Cloud: A Game-Changer for Developers

In the recent Laracon Conference in Dallas US, Taylor Otwell announced Laravel Cloud and shown a small demo of how it’s going to look and feel and how easy it is to ship your laravel projects. In this post, we will see what is Laravel Cloud, what features it will have, and how easy it is to go from local to production in a minute.

As a versatile developer, I’ve worked with a lot of frameworks and programming languages. I’ve worked a lot with NextJS along Laravel, and what I loved about NextJS or any other react project is how easy and straight-forward it is to host your NextJS projects and ready for production with tools like Vercel. I always wished there was something that does the same without needing me to go through all the configuration and things that needs to be taken care of for Laravel.

Well, there was Forge and Envoyer in the Laravel’s ecosystem to make the process a little easier but not that easy that it should be and could be. We had to configure everything that we would do if we were using a VPS directly but Forge was just sort of GUI to avoid the terminal with some extra tools to make it faster.

When Laravel Forged was launched, it got Laravel more easier to work with and provided a UI to manage your servers more easily and in a flow, to easily manage queues, environmental variables, logs and what not. And after a few years Laravel’s Vapor got released which made serverless laravel project management even more easier. And we have Laravel Cloud coming up to make things even easier to manage and go live within literally a minute.

Here’s how the dashboard of Laravel Cloud looks like (low quality, I know):

What Laravel Cloud brings to the table?

Laravel Cloud will be simplifying the process of deploying full stack laravel application to the cloud real quick. Laravel Cloud will deploy your application with everything taken care of with just a single click. One of the best feature of Laravel Cloud in my opinion is the hibernation feature, you can put your server into sleep when it’s not being used, saving a lot of money specially with the staging servers which we only use when a new PR is created. One other thing which I’ve not seen in any other services would be creating the database and linking them directly without touching the environment variables or configuration. You just create the database and link it to the website.

Key Features

Here’s a short summary of some of the features shown in the demo:

• HTTP Traffic Analytics: In your website overview, you will be able to see useful information about your traffic and how your server and website is handling them by showing you stats such as Total Requests, Average Duration and Most Daily Requests.
• Zero Configuration: Since Laravel Cloud is built for Laravel and by the Laravel team, they know what needs to be changed to go to production and they do that all by itself. The only configuration you would probably need is for external API keys in your .env file.
• Quick Deployment: In the demo video, Taylor showed how fast Laravel Cloud works and deploys your application just within a few seconds, it does all that installing, migrations, building and everything within that timeframe.
• Easily Scalability: It’s really easy to scale your application according to your needs. You can increase the memory and the replicas of your application in the cloud.
• Hibernation: You are able to turn your application into Hibernation automatically if no requests were received within a defined amount of time saving cost.
• Easy Database Management: Everything related to your database is managed by Laravel Cloud, you don’t need to worry about scaling or the infrastructure, the only thing you need to worry about is the name of the database and that’s it! You can easily link the database to multiple websites without changing any variables. And your database is also hibernated with your website.
• Easy Queue Management: You can easily add daemons to your server for queue management and Laravel Cloud makes sure that they are always running and if for any reason it got down, it will turn it up again. You can also add separate worker servers if you want.
• Free SSL & DDOS Attack Protection: Laravel Cloud provides free SSL certificates to all the websites and also provide a free basic DDos attach protection to all your websites.
• And much more!

When it’s coming up?

In the Laracon Conference, Taylor mentioned that we should expect it in Q4 (October – December) 2024. But on a personal note, I’ve this feeling that it will be out for the public on or just before November 7&8 2024, that’s when the Laracon AU is scheduled and they would want the developer to use it by then.

But you might be able to get early access by joining their waitlist on their website.

How much does it costs?

While not all the prices have been made public yet but we have some information that we can count on. There are two types of pricing in Laravel Cloud, Sandbox and Production. The sandbox prices are made public in the conference but not the production.

Here’s what they shared on their conference:

There will be no monthly fee for sandbox unlike production. You pay 1 cent per hour for computing, you get serverless Postgres database from 4 cent to 75 cents per hour, you get free laravel.cloud domains and hibernation included.

Regarding the production pricing, they only mentioned that there will be a monthly fee on top of the computing & database fees.

You can watch the full conference that includes other products and updates they will be launching soon down below: