I started a project at production with Laravel Vapor! Guess what happened?

What is Laravel Vapor?

According to the website itself (https://vapor.laravel.com.br), it is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel (for those who don’t know it is a web framework for the PHP language), using Amazon AWS resources (Number 1 on cloud servers). And their great promise is that you will fall in love with the simplicity of maintaining scalable servers! It will be?

My first reaction was: Whaaaaatttttt ???? In PHP ???? hueuhehue. Nowayyy…

Is it everything magic, like they said?

Finally, I had a challenge, to deliver a 6-month project and 2 to 3 programmers within 3 months with just 1 programmer!

The conversation went something like this:

me: Whoa !!!!! (that’s what came into my head.)
investor asked again: is it possible?
I thought and then said: wait, I saw something new, I never used it, I don’t even know how it works, I’ll check it and I’ll answer you soon

I ran and looked for something new that had been created (I don’t remember where I first saw it, but I knew it was for Laravel) and I came across a presentation by Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel and also Vapor.

I went back to the investor again and said:

it is possible, but it will cost

He accepted! So now it was ready, this was the first week of 2020, new year, new project, we will use as many things as possible and as many services as possible.

In another article I will write about the end of this story, now I will pass on the experiences I had with Vapor in the following months.

Is it really scalable?

The main answer is YES, it does! You have to prepare your pocket maybe to use all the resources, but it is beautiful to see how the Vapor works. In one line of code your assets are published on an Amazon CDN service (Cloud front). Your database changes are complete, and you have access to 2 environments: staging and production.

Staging is a testing environment, ideal for sharing with the team to do the tests before sending to production.

Production is the production environment.

It’s beautiful to see the system running, it works perfectly! And the best using AWS Lambda, a perfect service for scale, serving new users quickly without difficulty.

Did everything go well then?

Not! It has some features that don’t work perfectly, you have to have a little mastery of the Amazon AWS platform.
Where did I have a problem?

Error log (does not work very well)
Cache (looks beautiful in the documentation, but doesn’t work properly)

Conclusion

I completed the project in 2 and a half months and had plenty of time to make necessary corrections and adjustments. Now, would I recommend Vapor? For sure! It greatly speeds up product delivery and it is certainly a service that I will use in other projects! Now I ask you, have you used Laravel Vapor?