Latest / The Laravel Podcast / Laravel’s Current Moment, and Laravel Cloud Listener Q&A
Transcript
- **Matt Stauffer:** All right. Well, hey everybody, welcome back to the Laravel podcast. We are live, well not live, but we are here together at Laracon. Taylor just gave his big announcement talk yesterday and we have just taken a moment backstage to answer a couple of listener submitted questions and then we're going to kind of send him back his way as the big conference guy. So thank you for spending a little time hanging out. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, glad to be here. **Matt Stauffer:** All right, so we're just going to run through it. So the majority of the questions we have are, almost all of them are user submitted. There's a couple about the things you announced, but almost everything's about Cloud, because that's kind of where everybody's attention is right now. But before we go into those, just want to ask you, it's the afternoon of day two. You put more effort into this, at least physically, than any other thing. Obviously, you put effort in code, but how's Laracon going for you? **Taylor Otwell:** I think it's going really well. I think all the talks have been really strong. Everyone that's come up to me has said they're having a great time, which is most important. I think the venue looks awesome. The event team did a really good job with the staging and the set and everything. So I'm really happy. think I think it's going well, **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, I've I mean I don't like to be the everything newest is the latest and the best but this feels like in so many ways it's the biggest and best of Saracens. There's I mean there's numbers and there's you know, the significance of the announcement. But I just feel like the community has hit a tipping point I know Aaron and you have both mentioned like Cloud and some of these things are like the tipping point. But I feel like the tipping point has started before that like they are carrying the tipping point on. But it feels like the energy and the people the number of new people here the number of people outside the Laravel world who are influencers elsewhere who are like oh Laravel like I feel like this is the year a lot of that is happening. I don't know if you feel that energy. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, I do feel that energy and in some ways we'd love to like capitalize on that. **Matt Stauffer:** Yes. **Taylor Otwell:** I feel like there's you know, a little bit of a feeling I guess online for better or worse could be true could be not of where people are sort of bogged down in complexity and they want to just ship apps and that's always sort of been like our bread and butter and the Laravel ecosystem is just having really great tools for shipping apps and really cool libraries and stuff. So I think it's just like in the same way that I feel like Laravel came onto the scene at the right moment in time in PHP's history. I feel like this is all happening with Laravel cloud and with a lot of the stuff we're building at a really good time where people are sort of like, gosh, it should be easier than this. And maybe we've kind of just like things have gotten too complex. So yeah, it's an interesting time in web development. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, well it's cool because you'd think of it as like one of those like, well, you know, we're all wanting simplicity, whether it's a hosting simplicity or development simplicity or whatever, you know, and Laravel came at the right time, but it's one of those like, it's the overnight success that took 10 years, you know, like you literally were out there on stage and you're like, we've been doing this for 10 years. I'm like, the number of web-based frameworks that are new and sexy right now that have been around for this long, right? There's things that have been around forever. And there's things that are new and sexy, to have both of those at the same time, I feel like it's a really special way to tap into what Laravel has to offer at this moment, you know? **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. **Matt Stauffer:** Well, yeah, it's been really fun seeing how you and the team are, you know, like I've historically been someone who I'm like, how do we get Laravel known outside of our ecosystem? Cause I think it helps, you know, it helps you, it helps me, it helps our whole team. Like all the folks who are using Laravel, writing Laravel, all that kind of stuff for us to be known further, because we want more companies to want to use it. We want more programmers to learn it and everything like that. So it's very fun this whole rising, I always get it wrong, rising tide raises all ships or whatever, where any little thing that raises the portfolio and the awareness of Laravel benefits all of us in all these ways. So it's just really fun seeing like everyone's just here for the same thing. We're all here to have a good time, to ship, and also to give more people the opportunity to do the same thing. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, it's cool to see people outside of the Laravel community sort of like taking notice a little bit more this year, whereas it feels like... Somehow PHP is just like staying relevant. And I think, like you said about, we've been at this for 10 years. I think that consistency is a big part of it. A lot of stuff in web dev just sort of fizzles out. Either the maintainers get burned out or it just sort of like gets too complex. And so someone builds a new thing that is less complex, but then they eventually have the same problems and it's just like a cycle. Whereas I think one of Laravel's biggest advantages is we've just been very consistently improving the ecosystem for many years. We've also been very careful to curate the framework itself. I know that's not always fun on GitHub, but you know, like I'm still the person that handles all the pull requests, which I think is actually really helpful. You have like one curator that maintains kind of stylistic... **Matt Stauffer:** The vision, consistency... **Taylor Otwell:** Across the whole framework on the open source side. Yeah. So I think just that day to day grind or sticking with it while not like.. Sexy over 13 years. It's just something that gives Laravel a little bit of its I think it's a reason why we're like even still in the conversation right? For full stack web dev which is amazing to even be not only in the conversation, but I think you know up there with like the leaders of like the productive ways to build web apps. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, and I've been talking to people a lot about this at this conference that the curation and the vision of something like this is so foundational because I keep referencing jQuery plugins. Like there was a time where the whole web ran on not just jQuery but the plugins and the plugin authors were almost to a T, almost all of them were missing the idea of like just because somebody asks you for something doesn't mean you should add it. Just because you have 17 different ways to do it doesn't mean we now need 17 parameters. And so it's the combination of like the vision and the ability to say like yes or no to things to know when to cut. To keep the API simple to know when something's gotten too bogged down and go refactor it. I feel like if we had all the other things Laravel had and didn't have that, especially that steady over 13 years, then we wouldn't be in the place because we would be 13 years of cruft, 13 years of overwhelm, you know? **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, I think so too. And it's been crazy also to hear, you know, just talking about PHP's relevancy. Some of the stories I've heard here at Laracon where I heard of a large company migrating a huge dot net system to PHP, Laravel. And usually you would think when people get enterprise, they go sort of the opposite direction. They start like Haki, maybe it's PHP and they eventually migrate to something that maybe people would consider more robust. But it's pretty crazy like you're having systems actually migrate to Laravel from other languages or to PHP because of Laravel. And I think it's just because of the ecosystem and the consistency of improvement that we've had over the years. And also just sort of like the vibrancy of the community. Like if you come to Laracon or even if you're just involved on social media, you see how excited people are about Laravel and just how kind of like the good vibes in the community. So I think that draws developers in and makes them want to use it too. **Matt Stauffer:** I love it. And yeah, everyone who's here for the first time, they're like, y 'all are like, you have an energy. And I'm like, yes, I love that. Apparently we could talk for this all day, but I don't want to keep you so long because I know there's other things you have to get back to. I'm actually going to cut a couple of questions here and we're going to talk really briefly about a couple of code things and then go to Cloud. So from a code perspective, one of the things I wanted to ask you about was as you were and for anyone else here, if you've not seen Taylor's announcement talk, go to that first. We're not going to rehash any of that. It's already been done. It's fantastic. So defer, cache, flexible and concurrent all felt like a part of the same puzzle for me of changing. You know, the story has always been like these other languages have these long running processes and there's pros and cons of those and PHP it is one and done. And we do have Octane. So Octane is this sort of like, if you need this complexity, you can do that. But it's basically been like Octane or single request in that it's is it, you know, and I'm not saying it has been impossible to do these things, but historically, basically, it's either you do it, you do Octane, or maybe you push it on a queue or something like that. These seem like they're kind of giving us a little in between space. Do you see it in similar that those three are all I mean, I guess maybe cache flexible is not quite that same way, but all of them, I feel like are giving us more opportunity to not just see something as either long -lived or immediate does that make sense that we're just gonna get a little more more gray area there? **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, and I mean to give you some background on Defer. So Defer obviously is a way to defer the execution of function until after the response was sent to the browser that was already possible before but you had to use like terminable middleware. You'd use like app terminating and it wasn't consistent across where you were in your app. So if you're in the web layer, that's great. But if you're in a queue job or your or it's some code that's invoked from a queue job like a repository or some other service, that didn't work anymore. So you sort of had to maintain in your head where you were in the code, which is just not, it wasn't a great way to work, but now you can just use defer anywhere, queue, CLI, web, it just all works. And like on the web, like I showed in my talk, if an exception happens, the deferred function is discarded unless you tell it not to. And the same way on the CLI, if the artisan command exits with a non-zero exit code, the function is discarded unless you tell it not to. **Matt Stauffer:** Brilliant. **Taylor Otwell:** So Defer was about almost like a consistency of API. A lot of what Defer brings to the table, I think I personally find myself using Defer more than concurrency. I just think it has a wider use case for most Laravel developers where I want to send an email or I want to make a quick API call to some other service and I'm fine with running that after the response. I'm just gonna defer it. don't feel like setting up a key worker right now or extracting this to a class or whatever. I think that's a pretty common use case. Concurrency, it is, one it's driver based, which I didn't show in my talk. **Matt Stauffer:** Really? **Taylor Otwell:** So in my talk I showed the process driver, which fans outworked other PHP processes. So we used Laravel's serializable closure feature to serialize the closure. Send it to a hidden artisan command that invokes the closure and sends the response back to the parent process. And that, so that's one driver. And then we have a fork driver, which uses PHP's forking functionality. That is faster than the process driver. However, it's only available on the CLI, because forking doesn't work in web requests for PHP. So yeah, it is kind of related to Octane because people may know you can do concurrent work in Octane if you're using Swool, but I feel like the concurrency facade kind of brings that to the vast majority of apps that honestly just aren't using something like that. Most people are deploying their Laravel apps on a really standard web server stack like NGINX and they're not using Swool or anything like that. So this brings kind of like concurrency for the rest of us. **Matt Stauffer:** Awesome, I love that. **Taylor Otwell:** Which I think is really cool. So yeah, I'm excited about both Defer and Concurrency. And like you said, the first sort of unlocked the cache flexible method, which is sort of an SWR or stay a while, revalidate pattern implementation. It was like heavily championed by Tim McDonald. It was like a really cool cash feature. Like for me now, I'll just always reach for cache flexible or something like cache remover or something like that, because I just feel like it's just a much better experience for users and much faster response times. And who knows what else it will unlock? You know, I think... That's the cool thing about Defer is just like now that our brain is kind of thinking like, we have this as an option. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah. What else? **Taylor Otwell:** There'll be more use cases that come down the line, you know, and I think there'll be use cases not only for your own apps, but for package developers. So when we, when we build something like Laravel Nova, for example, if we have a dashboard with a lot of data, is there a way to pull that concurrently? Because a lot of that is not really, we don't need to load it in a certain order. You know, if we're showing every relation that a model has. We could totally pull that concurrently and not have to wait for every query in line. Who knows where we'll go with it, but I think it unlocks a lot of really cool possibilities. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, and a lot of packages maybe don't have the opportunity to know for sure what your infrastructure is going to be, but if they can say, you do this and then we're going to defer this expensive operation, baseline is going to be just faster. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, exactly. So you don't have to require people to set up a QWorker just to do something. **Matt Stauffer:** Ahh that's brilliant. And they can't, right? There's the defer version and then the QWorker version. Freaking great. Okay. I want to talk about design just for a second. You have used outside design firms, you've done some of your own design, you've contracted Steve at times or various folks, but now you have a design director and like I mean, immediately he's made some changes to the logo. He's obviously doing the design work, but he's also like setting up a branding thing. Does it feel any different to you going from your baby who you occasionally hire out a little bit of design work for to your company that has a design director and a design system. Does it feel any different or does it sort of feel like it's supernatural? **Taylor Otwell:** It feels way different. I think it's going to be one of those hires I look back on and be like, we should have done that seven years ago. And like you said, just little stuff like the logo. For example, I've always known for a long time that when the logo gets small, it's too thin. So he builds a small variant of the logo that's a little bit thicker stroke width at small sizes. But having someone to think about not only design, but David Hill, our new head of design, is also just a really good product thinker. And thinking about the way the user flows through the app and where will they get stuck and where will they get confused. He's not really just about making things pretty as he says. And he's good at that, but I think he's also really good at just thinking through the product holistically and what we want users to experience in what order and how it should all work. So that's been really helpful as well. You know, like, he's already doing so much for us. Like he designed everything from Laravel Cloud to MyLaraconSlides to the coffee packaging with the Terminal guys. So he's been doing a lot and I would love to bring, you know, his design taste background to our existing products. So we totally plan on revisiting Forge that design, know over time. I don't know when that will happen, but it's on our agenda. So I'm excited about that as well. **Matt Stauffer:** Okay, and that's that really natural transition to talk about Cloud for a little bit I'm gonna cut again. I'm gonna cut a few more questions in between things just to keep it time short so a Lot of folks are asking what does Clouds announcement mean for Forge and Vapor? Is that mean they're gonna be sunset? Is it just gonna be for these tiny little subset of people? Do you have an answer yet for where do you think they I mean you just mentioned you're going to put time and energy into them. So obviously they're not going away. Do you kind of have an easy answer for here's who should use each or is it still kind of something you're figuring out. **Taylor Otwell:** I think each person will have to decide for themselves what they like and what they want to use. However you know there's been I feel like this has been presented in this mutually exclusive way online not in our community but in other communities like JavaScript for example we have really big fully managed platforms right like Netlify, Vercel and so on. And then you have kind of like the Pieter Levels of the world. It's like the $5 VPS bros, right? And I feel like Laravel is in this unique position where we sort of are like we're cool with like giving both of these options actually because I think There's just you know, people are different and some people Some people just prefer to have a traditional server some people prefer it for different reasons like they want to bring their own AWS account because of some security situation of their company or whatever. **Matt Stauffer:** Ownership thing or... **Taylor Otwell:** It's not realistic for them to have a fully managed platform. I think a lot of devs really would enjoy the experience of a fully managed platform. I know that's honestly what I enjoy like I don't want to think about anything. I just want to get push and go. I don't really feel like we need to choose one or the other I think you know, we've already got Forge. We have more features planned for Forge And we have a long roadmap, honestly, that's gonna take us well into next year, I'm sure, of stuff to build for Forge. But I think having a fully managed platform is just like the next logical step for Laravel. Newcomers into the ecosystem, Forge might feel really easy to use and really logical to OGs, ya know, like us that are used to configuring servers, and we've been doing it for a long time. But people that are just picking up Laravel, and the VS Code extension really ties into this as well, the whole story needs to be so easy. And having something like Laravel Cloud where you can just link a GitHub repo and hit deploy and it just works and you have a URL, you don't just have like an IP address or something, it's just a much better experience I think. So anyway, to circle back to your question, we're kind of like why not both? And people can decide what's best for their company or what's best for them as a developer and we'll be here to support both of those products. **Matt Stauffer:** And I mean as someone who works with hundreds of clients every year, we will see our clients across different spaces. There's no every week clients on cloud. If they don't care, it's going to be cloud, if they don't have preference, but a lot of them do. And so it makes a ton of sense. Also as someone who does tutorials, I'm very excited about what Cloud does for that. That doesn't mean I'm not going to stop. I'm going stop using Forge for some things, but I'm super excited about that story. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, and I think there's interesting use cases for Cloud that people might not consider. So for example, you could have your production app running on your own AWS account on something like Forge or Vapor. But maybe you sign up for Cloud and you just use preview deployments or you just use staging environments because it's just really simple. And we can spin them up really fast and we have Hibernate and maybe you use Cloud for this big staging playground, but your production app runs in your own AWS account. It's more sort of slightly different setup. So I think people can mix and mash what they use. So it'd be interesting to see how people use the products. And I think that's part of our early access program that we put up on cloud.laravel.com is we would love to get some interesting people into the platform later this year to get that feedback about what's working, what do you like? What do you love? What do hate? So yeah, it's going to be fun. **Matt Stauffer:** I'm super excited about that. And it actually naturally transitions to one of the questions that was about pricing. And someone said, okay, so I've got, I think it was one cent an hour for the compute and then four cents an hour for the Postgres. And then they were saying, how many hours is there going to be? I was like, yeah, but when you're trying to calculate this minimum spend and getting that $28 or whatever ends up being, that's assuming that it's going to be up and running the entire time. And it feels to me like Hibernate is the magic. Because by the time your thing is being accessed 24 hours a day, you're probably not uncomfortable with this, whatever that minimum spend was. But if it's this thing you're just spinning up and it's only being touched when you're using it, it's like less than 10 % usage. Is it really truly that when it is hibernating, you're not paying anything on any of those services? **Taylor Otwell:** On the compute, you're not paying when the app is hibernating. On the database, you're not paying for compute, but if you have a gigabyte sitting on disk, you're paying 75 cents a month or **Matt Stauffer:** Is it a month? I was wondering what the 75 was. **Taylor Otwell:** 75 cents a month per gigabyte is our current thinking there. And the compute starts at less than a penny a month. It's slightly less I think if it's running 24 hours a day The smallest compute instance comes out to roughly like five bucks a month. So roughly like a Digital Ocean box on the smallest compute instance. But again like your app if it's staging it's not running maybe even the majority of the time. Yeah. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, really. **Taylor Otwell:** It's, you know, people can, you know, they're surprising trade-offs, but we think like the convenience and the integration of how convenient the compute is, how the database story ties together, how easy it is to deploy environments to make Cloud like really compelling. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, I completely agree with that. And when I was first hearing about this, I was kind of feeling a little anxious that it's gonna be one of these like. We'll use VPS for the side projects, or we'll Forge for the side projects and we'll move the production ones over to Cloud and it's going to be this like, it's going to be cool but it's going to be back and forth. And my dream would always be just that like, if we plan to use Cloud for production, we're going to use Cloud for staging. And when I saw the stuff you're talking about with pricing with the Hibernate, I was like, that's just a no-brainer. And I can't believe I'm saying that, but it really feels like it. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, it was honestly the most important part of Laravel Cloud for me was, it's funny how like casually it came about actually. A couple months ago, I was just like a little bit concerned about why would anyone ever choose Cloud over Forge? And then, you know, I sent a message in our Slack and I was like, can we sleep these apps if they're not working? Like Heroku had this feature, you know, and I guess still does where we can put your app to sleep sort of if you're on the eco plan or whatever, or they even force you like to have this on. Because I thought if we can do that, I really wanted it, the number one priority for me was every side project, I just wanted it to be a no-brainer. I'm just gonna throw it on Cloud, and you just don't have to think about it, because you know, I'm still working on it, it's not getting any traffic except for me right now, but I just want a Laravel.cloud URL, because it's convenient to share it as I work on it with friends or whatever. I just wanted it to be such a no-brainer that you would put that on Laravel Cloud, both for the compute and on your database, because we can sleep both. And the database actually right now wakes up even faster than the compute. And if a request comes in while your app is hibernating, I think it's like, I want to say it's like four or five seconds. So there is a cold start and we honestly haven't spent a lot of time optimizing that. There may be more juice we can squeeze out of that. So yeah, I again, I just wanted it to be a no brainer that if I'm building something in Laravel, I'm going to throw it on Cloud and I don't have to worry about like, that's going to cost me this much in compute, blah, blah. So yeah. **Matt Stauffer:** I love that. I'm very excited about that. So one of our folks on Suggest.gg said, I saw that you picked Postgres instead of MySQL. Is this something that is going to be a new default or is it just that you all have happened to program the Postgres implementation right now first? **Taylor Otwell:** It's more that we've happened to do the Postgres stuff first. And this is actually something I had in my talk notes that I skipped over. When you're up there talking, there's so much running through your head while you're trying to talk that it's easy to miss something. So we are actually deep into working on MySQL as well. The MySQL solution we've been pursuing so far is not serverless like the Postgres. It's a more fixed size, traditional MySQL offering. I don't want to commit too hard on the details about that since it's still in progress and I don't know what it will exactly look like, how much it will cost or any of that. Only to say we are working on it and it is our goal to have MySQL and Postgres at launch. But the Postgres stuff was just much further along. And Postgres stuff also has features I didn't demo. So we can do data branching, we can do replicas. There's a lot of features that just weren't quite ready to show on stage that are also in progress on the Postgres side as well. **Matt Stauffer:** And I assume that if I'm in a place where I'm going to be spinning up a new branch for every pull request or something like that with a little drop down, that's all going to be managed from a database relationship perspective as well, right? **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah. Exactly. And there'll be multiple options there. So our thinking is, if we're doing something like preview deployments, you may want to branch your staging database with all the data, without all the data. People have kind of different strategies of how they like to do that with Cedars and all of that. So there will be some options and configurations there in Laravel Cloud that we'll sort through. Yeah, I think it's going to be a really huge, powerful upgrade over probably how people do that today. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, 100%. All right, so a lot of people were asking about kind of like the stuff that powers everything. So one of the things was people are asking if I'm already, my database is already running an AWS, is there ability for me to bring my own database and have it behind the firewalls? And then that led to them asking the question, is this on AWS or not? And I don't know how much you want to share about that, but let's say somebody does have an existing databases. Are we going to be able to kind of connect existing servers in, or is it like everything should be really spun up from within Cloud? **Taylor Otwell:** Our goal is that you should be able to bring your own database. That could be on another third party database provider. For example, let's say PlanetScale for MySQL. Of course, can use something like that with Laravel Cloud. Laravel Cloud is on AWS infrastructure right now. We just feel like that's where a lot of these services live. Which kind of makes everyone else want to be there too. **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah, totally. **Taylor Otwell:** So yeah, it does run on AWS. And our goal is to let people use their database. I know some people have very sophisticated private things set up with their database. So I think it will depend a little bit on each situation. But that's definitely our goal is that you're not locked into using whatever we offer. **Matt Stauffer:** OK, that's really cool. So the real quick one, a couple folks said, is Redis something that's upcoming as well as a first party? **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, so there's a couple things that I didn't show in the demo that are obviously very high on our list. Redis is one for caching. And I didn't show anything related to like S3 type file storage. And that's another big one. Those are actually two of the biggest things on our short roadmap that we're working on post Laracon. That's what we'll be buckling down on honestly as well as like the MySQL story Yeah, continuing to flesh out the rest of the postgres story as well. There's there's so much that goes in to building a product like this and like it's crazy how far we've gotten in six months. We still have a lot to do. But yeah, I mean you're basically rebuilding a cloud platform from top to bottom So you have to think about every part of the application. But yeah, definitely definitely those things are We're well aware that we're working on working on those and our goal is to have those for public launch. **Matt Stauffer:** Okay, I love that. So a few folks, and I think this might be our last question, a few folks were asking about CloudFlare custom domains and everything. And so they were kind of just saying, if I've got my domain somewhere else, am I just going to have to point all of my domains over to CloudFlare? Or can I just point one of the individual, just the A name or something like that over to CloudFlare? Do you know a lot about the specifics there? **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, you don't have to bring like your whole domain. You don't have to point it to Laravel Cloud. We give you the records that you need to add and we give you the records you need to add to verify that you actually own the domain. And then we give you the records to add to point to our infrastructure. Yeah, so Laravel actually owns an IP block now. **Matt Stauffer:** Wow. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, that was a process. **Matt Stauffer:** I believe it. **Taylor Otwell:** I don't know if anyone's ever gone down that route, but it's complicated and time consuming to buy a block of IPs. You have to worry about reputation of the IPs and all sorts of things you don't usually have to think about. We have that. We've gone through that whole process earlier this year and we basically tell you where to point your DNS records for Laravel Cloud. **Matt Stauffer:** That's very cool. I think that's the best for us to cover right now. there anything we didn't get a chance, like any of the things that maybe were in your notes you get to cover that you'd like to share about today? **Taylor Otwell:** The MySQL thing was a big one. And that was a big thing for me to skip over in my talks. That was a pretty important point. Other than that, mean, just like, you know, get on the waiting list for Cloud. We really are, if you have an app that you think would be a really awesome fit as a early access partner for Cloud, shoot me an email. I think we're looking for people that both have big new ideas that they're working on, as well as maybe some existing projects and across a wide variety of customers, everyone from Indie hackers all the way up to large enterprises. We would love to hear from you and work together to build this product. **Matt Stauffer:** Brilliant! Well, thank you so much for taking time. know you're super busy and we're super excited about this. Thanks, man. **Taylor Otwell:** Yeah, thanks. **Matt Stauffer:** We'll see you all next time.