Anyone using Laravel Vapor in production yet?
I haven't tried it yet but I find the concept interesting. Any issues with performance? Storage? Costs?
Posted Oct 23, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC
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I’m using it in an internal application. I’m also not an AWS expert at all.
The whole process of setting it up was super slick. It takes care of a lot of the aws setup, domain, ssl, as well as the environment variable setup for you too.
It feels very Laravel, if that makes sense.
Having said that, if you aren’t doing things the “vapor/Laravel way” then all the benefits go out the window.
In terms of cost it has been about the same. AWS does offer monthly free lambda usage (1 million gb sec I think).
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Not yet but hopefully before Christmas or early 2020.
Recommended reading if you are planning on moving to Vapor: https://divinglaravel.com/vapor
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Those are some really good articles, thanks for sharing! I wish they wrote more about how one should structure their application to work best with vapor and aws- just some more specific suggestions and not just a very overhead view of some issues
But they explained how aws works in a way that made sense, that I have not been able to figure out out of any other article before
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No, but there are always "gotchas" with all these systems that take control of things for you. Just roll your own.. make the smallest image possible on AWS, add it to an auto-scaling group, and you are pretty much done. Or just go ELASTIC BEANSTALK with it if you don't want to get your hands dirty in tweaking stuff.
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I thought Taylor said that vapor is running in vapor 🤔
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Insert infinite recursion meme here
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It is.
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We are actually running two of our applications in vapor since the beta invites. It’s been great for us so far after we figured out a few gotchas. We’ve also been in direct contact with Taylor regarding some stuff. It was obvious at the start that the platform needed some more work but it’s been great so far. Our costs are down hypothetically.
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Hypothetically?
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The server these applications were running on before has not changed. So the costs of that have not gone down for us. So hypothetically the costs are down since it’s only a few dollars a month. Realistically, the cost has gone up since we use vapor. But I would definitely recommend giving it a try.
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We're running an app in pre-production (production with very limited users) and it's already way less of a headache than hosting on EC2 for our team with limited devops experience. I wish it was easier to look through logs without opening the CloudWatch console, and I wish it was easier to see when scheduled commands ran, but otherwise no complaints.
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I’m getting ready to go live with it. I actually paid someone about $1000 to make sure the AWS was set up correctly. But my app is medical and requires some extra security steps.
One major problem we had was CloudWatch. When Laravel throws a string of errors, they all get pushed to cloudwatch one line at a time. Because serverless typically has a “warming function” that pings the app every five minutes, we were generating millions of error logs a day. AWS cost jumped from $25 to $100 a week with no users. Then we found the problem and put some throttles in place. AWS also refunded most of it just because they’re helpful.
Vapor support was also quite responsive with Taylor himself stepping in to look at our logs. All in all, I have no complaints with AWS or vapor. They were both exemplary.
So keep an eye on your AWS usage IN the AWS console would be my advice. Spikes can happen due to errors, misconfigs and etc. Also it’s just a good habit to be in.
You can set up billing alarms too on AWS which can be very helpful in cases like these
Yes, and thank goodness that we had this problem in testing rather than in production where it could have been much more expensive.
Can you skip the CloudWatch logging entirely?
We typically send ours to Bugsnag already, so it'd be redundant anyways.
Yes, I believe you can. You should be able to turn it off in AWS console directly. That said, you’d likely want your lambda function to still be giving system logs as that may not be accessible anywhere else...
Sorry I can’t be more specific. I pay people to handle this and am still learning myself
How did you manage to get Vapor support? I cannot find any contact info anywhere. Only method seems to be tweeting someone from the Laravel team.
Interested in this as we are developing a medical app and deploying via forge but would like to go the server less route via lambda and AWS.
Hi, once you have run the application successfully, would you consider clone the aws setting through the cloud management tool something like terrarorm? Because I am also interested in vapor but it’s a little bit expensive for me. (personal survey)
Thanks.