120: Taylor Otwell - Serverless Laravel with Vapor

This episode of Full Stack Radio, I talked to Taylor Atwell about scaling Laravel with serverless on Laravel Vapor. This is Full Stack Radio episode 120. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Full Stack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wadden. And today, it is my pleasure to welcome back to the show Taylor Atwell, the the creator of Laravel. How's it going, dude? Pretty good. How are you? I can't complain except for, a devastating Rocket League defeat that we just suffered. Other than that, things are going pretty well. We'll just pretend go on this podcast, pretend that never happened. Yeah. So the reason I want to have you on the show is, we just got back from Laracon, and you kind of finally announced this big kind of secret project you've been working on for the last six or seven months, which is Laravel Vapor. So what is kind of your pitch for Laravel Vapor? So Laravel Vapor is a a plat a way to ship out your Laravel applications out into production on a serverless platform, powered by AWS. So that means it runs on top of AWS Lambda, and it also gives you a nice interface for interacting with some other aspects of AWS, like databases, cache, sets up your queues and stuff for you, configures DNS records, certificates, all that good stuff. I think we interact with, like, 10 to 15 different AWS services. So it takes all the setting up a serverless application is actually really, really confusing, and I had to read a lot of documentation. So I just wanted to make the whole experience a lot smoother for Laravel devs so it's really easy to get started. Cool. So, for people who don't even know, like, what serverless even means, like, what is serverless, and why would you want to deploy your application to some sort of serverless platform? Yeah. So I think serverless means different things to different people, but I think they're, like, true serverless purists. It it means basically, auto scaling on demand, but also scaling down to zero. So that's a big, that's a big thing for, like, real serverless is that when you're not using it, you're generally not paying anything. So AWS Lambda works this way where they charge you in one hundred millisecond increments. DynamoDB, which is a serverless database, works this way where if you're not making any recent rights, you're not paying for anything except your data storage. So that that's, a big chunk of it. Then, of course, another part of it is just not worrying about the underlying infrastructure that your application is using. So for your application, you're not worried about, you know, I have four web servers and a load balancer and all of that, and they run Ubuntu, and you have to keep them updated. You're not thinking about any of that. And same way on the database side, you're not worrying about manually administering …