Episode #7: Serverless Laravel using Vapor with Taylor Otwell

Serverless Chats

About Taylor Otwell:

Taylor Otwell is the creator of the Laravel framework, Laravel Forge, Envoyer.io, and Laravel Vapor. Before building Laravel, Taylor was an enterprise .NET and COBOL developer. He now works on Laravel and its ecosystem of tools full-time.

• Twitter: @taylorotwell
• Laravel on Twitter: @laravelphp
• Laravel: laravel.com
• Laravel Vapor: vapor.laravel.com
• Laravel Forge: forge.laravel.com

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Taylor Otwell. Hi, Taylor. Thanks for joining me.

Taylor: Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So you are the creator of the Laravel Framework, which is a very popular framework for PHP. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what Laravel is and what it does?

Taylor: Sure. So I started programming professionally in 2008 after I graduated college, and I was originally a .NET developer in the enterprise world and started tinkering around with PHP on the side in 2010, and sort of in the fall or winter of 2010, I wrote my own PHP framework, sort of inspired by a variety of things: inspired by Rails, inspired by my experience with ASP.NET MVC, inspired by Sinatra and Flask and all these other frameworks, and sort of put something out there in the PHP world that sort of riffed on all of those ideas and brought them together in sort of a really productive way, I thought. And so I put it out there in 2011 and you can think of it as sort of Ruby on Rails for PHP, mainly. So it has, you know, controllers and routes and a database ORM and queued jobs and all kinds of other stuff to let you build web applications in PHP in a very productive way.

Jeremy: Awesome. So people are probably wondering why you're on a serverless podcast. But recently at Laracon, you just announced Laravel Vapor. So why don't you tell us about that?

Taylor: Yeah, so Vapor is something that I've been working on for about the last nine or 10 months, full-time, 40 hours a week. And it all started really over a year ago. I was just really inspired by sort of the serverless ecosystem, what people like Zeit were doing for JavaScript with their Zeit Now product and I really wanted something like that for PHP and something that could tell sort of the whole story for PHP, because there's a lot of moving parts that Laravel developers expect if they were to go on serverless like, you know, what do I do about my database migrations? What do I do about my queued jobs? And so I wanted to build a product around serverless that sort of made sense for Laravel developers and that they would understand, that would provide a really good experience for them.

Jeremy: So I want to jump into the details of Laravel Vapor. But let's start with some background on Laravel. So you said it was sort of this Ruby on Rails for PHP. So what types of applications do you see people building with Laravel now?

Taylor: Oh, gosh. I've seen everything from help desk, you know, accounting applications. I've seen, you know, all kinds of back-office applications, intranet applications. Of course, I've written Forge, a server management platform on Laravel. I have a zero downtime deployment platform on Laravel. So I've really seen such a variety - hotel room management platforms - almost anything you can think of really, I've seen on Laravel.

Jeremy: So is this something that anything you can build with the Laravel Framework now, you're going to be able to just do serverless-ly with Vapor?

Taylor: That's sort of the hope, you know, that your application will translate well and there's a few differences, you know, when you're operating in serverless, we can get into. But that was sort of the goal, though, is to make it so you can deploy on Vapor, and things sort of work as you would expect, and you could build your application as you're used to in a traditional server environment. You can just deploy it on vapor and sort of have the same experience. That was the end goal I was shooting for.

Jeremy: So does the development workflow change now that you're dealing with different types of resources?

Taylor: Sure, your local development workflow is a little different depending on what you choose to use. You know, most Laravel applications are used to interacting with something like MySQL. We also ship with Vapor, a sort of a docker container, where you can run all of your unit tests against the production PHP build that actually runs on a Lambda side of Vapor. So we try to provide some tooling to make that experience a little better.

Jeremy: Very cool. So you mentioned this interest in sort of the serverless ecosystem, but what were your main reasons for building Laravel Vapor?

Taylor: Because I don't ever want to think about servers ever again. Basically. So it goes back to sort of Laravel Forge where really I built and released Laravel Forge in 2014. Sort of the idea there was, you know, I was building Laravel applications professionally, and I was constantly configuring servers with nginx with PHP, with Redis or whatever I needed. You know, and I was building them on let's say, like, DigitalOcean or Linode or some VPS provider and I had written bash scripts to do all that and automate all that. And so I sort of built a platform around that called Laravel Forge. And you can, you know, link your DigitalOcean account, create a 2GB server, and it installs everything you need, and then you can deploy your application out there. And that's all great. Like that works really well for a lot of applications. But there's still like a lot of headache that comes with that, even though a lot is automated for you. For example, like my operating system goes out of date. I sort of kind of have to worry about SSL certificates renewing. I have to worry about various vulnerabilities. I have to worry about all kinds of stuff I just don't want to think about. And then if I'm load balancing those servers, now I've got, you know, 5-10 servers to worry about. All those same problems just multiplied. And so while Laravel Forge does provide a lot of automation and sort of the traditional server environment can be automated in some fashion. The idea of going totally serverless and just never ever thinking about servers at all, never thinking about, you know, how am I gonna load balance them. All of that sounded really, really appealing to me, after managing, basically, thousands of servers with Forge so that was really appealing. And that's what really drew me to the whole ecosystem.

Jeremy: So was there something that prompted this? I mean, at what point did you look at AWS or Microsoft Azure and say, "Okay, now I can go serverless with this." Because PHP wasn't even supported as a runtime until November of last year when they came out with with custom runtimes for Lambda.

Taylor: Yeah. So there were some key things that happened. I remember the first most important thing was we could get Laravel up and running with a Node shim where when a HTTP request comes in, we use Node to sort of invoke PHP. And people were doing this with other languages too, you know, before custom run times. But always the big problem for me was how are we going to hook into the Laravel queue syst...