Cloud Launch Reflections, Nightwatch, and the Future of Forge  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Laravel Podcast]] - Full Title: Cloud Launch Reflections, Nightwatch, and the Future of Forge - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2c7d904c-756c-46de-ab9a-ab18291fc63a ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Laravel Cloud's Surprising Adoption** - Laravel Cloud launched successfully with unexpected rapid user growth. - Its usage-based pricing model requires user education to reduce surprise billing. Transcript: Matt Stauffer And then maybe we'll talk a little bit about more cloud after that. Taylor Otwell But first, like kind of what was the cloud like for you the launch like for you you know i think it went really well overall i mean in a variety of ways so firstly it worked right like we launched Cloud and people were able to use it and it did not go down so like that is great no like emergencies or like real catastrophes on a technical level. Yeah. I think it also went really well in the sense that we had many, many more users on it very quickly than we expected. It has grown faster than any previous product we've ever launched, which is great. The only reason I say it's maybe a little bit unexpected and we'll see how it trends over time. Compared to something like i think back to when maybe like versell or netlify was first launching like next js hosting let's say no one really had been self-hosting it a lot because it Was a very new framework compared to php where people have been self-hosting and managing PHP for almost 30 years, literally now. And I kind of thought people are not going to just migrate to Laravel Cloud day one if their app's already out there and working. It's just there's not a lot of business sense to do that. So I thought that Laravel Cloud would be a very kind of like slow but steady growing thing that eventually really pays off for us but it's just going to take time to get people migrated And to encourage them to do so through like our feature set yeah so there's many many more people on the platform very early than we expected you know some things that like we've been reflecting On and thinking about is it's just a very different model than people are used to with forge yeah and i always saw forge is like cloud's biggest competitor to be honest and yeah not in a Bad way it's just like they're two different paths you can take for running laravel apps and i think we want both of them to be really awesome yeah but for example like if i could reflect On like some pain points we're going through with cloud it's just like educational things like someone has a web app with like one gig of memory, but they've attached like a 500 gigabyte Cache to it that cost them $200 a month or whatever. I don't know what the price is off the top of my head, but just like a sort of unawareness of maybe what they need and what things are going to cost them. So we're actually trying to ship a pricing calculator by next week that lets you kind of like pick your app into different buckets. So like maybe you have a very small app or you're a SaaS startup or you're an e-commerce platform. You can kind of like put yourself in one of these buckets and we'll give you like recommendations on like this is probably what you need. And here's kind of what it will cost if it's fully utilized all month long. Yeah. So we're working on a lot of that kind of user educational stuff and then surfacing kind of billing details in the UI because it's just a different model than Forge where you're kind of Like paying for a server and you're done. But overall, it's been awesome. I think, you know, we've continued to ship some cool new stuff on it, like replicating environments. ([Time 0:02:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cccd6231-4070-45a4-9ffb-45f01f5a8407)) - **Educate Users on Cloud Pricing** - Provide clear pricing calculators to educate users on expected costs based on app type. - Include detailed billing information to help users understand their usage. Transcript: Taylor Otwell I don't know what the price is off the top of my head, but just like a sort of unawareness of maybe what they need and what things are going to cost them. So we're actually trying to ship a pricing calculator by next week that lets you kind of like pick your app into different buckets. So like maybe you have a very small app or you're a SaaS startup or you're an e-commerce platform. You can kind of like put yourself in one of these buckets and we'll give you like recommendations on like this is probably what you need. And here's kind of what it will cost if it's fully utilized all month long. Yeah. So we're working on a lot of that kind of user educational stuff and then surfacing kind of billing details in the UI because it's just a different model than Forge where you're kind of Like paying for a server and you're done. Matt Stauffer But ([Time 0:04:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9db51b21-478c-4171-b462-04b7aa4c9b64)) - **Cloud Best for Profitable Apps** - Laravel Cloud suits profitable apps more than hobby projects due to pricing differences. - Fully managed services benefit clients who can afford the extra cost over basic VPS hosting. Transcript: Matt Stauffer And the idea of like each app costing more than this droplet, you know, is not making sense. Therefore cloud doesn't make sense. And one of the things I told you about early on, and I kind of talked with the cloud team is that I'm most interested in cloud, not for myself, but for my clients. And I know that you guys are targeting more than just that. But we have so many clients that we have set up on Forge, set up on DigitalOcean, and now they just have a Forge account and a DigitalOcean account and don't know what to do with them. And they have to hire us when they want to make changes. And I was like, I love the idea of, yeah, they're going to pay more than Fortune DigitalOcean $5 box, but they're going to have a fully managed service. And there's, you know, we've tried Heroku before. We've tried other fully managed services for Laravel before. And they've never been the experience that, you know, that I'm hoping that our clients have as they move over to cloud. So I'm excited about further transparency around that pricing and also just talking about like, well, who's cloud for and who is it not? ([Time 0:06:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a32f9eba-e0f7-4627-b0c2-5d78b2b76498)) - **Enable Default Hibernation for Side Projects** - Enable hibernation by default for side projects on Laravel Cloud. - This change helps reduce costs by idling inactive apps automatically. Transcript: Taylor Otwell We're trying to make some changes as well to get people on the happy path for those kind of like side projects a little bit better on cloud. Like for example, when you create a new environment in cloud, previously we're not enabling hibernation by default on the app. But we're thinking we probably will do that for like sandbox accounts because we were seeing a fair number of people launch their like hobby project or side project on the cloud and it Wasn't hibernating because we don't enable it by default and they were like wait a second yeah i thought i thought it was supposed to i ([Time 0:08:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7d12a86d-bd11-47a1-bb84-2063a392d8bc)) - **MySQL Requires Backup Features for GA** - MySQL in Laravel Cloud remains beta due to incomplete automated backup and restore features. - Full general availability will follow once snapshot and point-in-time restore are implemented. Transcript: Taylor Otwell That yeah so we have uh like you said we have Postgres out now and then MySQL and beta. And one of the major reasons MySQL has been in beta is because of the backup restore story not being totally fleshed out during the beta period. And so what we're about to roll out over the next week or two is automated snapshots of your MySQL databases and the ability to restore them, you know, to a new MySQL cluster. And then further down the line, but still in the near term, we will have point in time restore for MySQL, just like Postgres to where you can restore to like, you know, down to the minute Or second or whatever the granularity is onto a new cluster. So that was the main reason we still have the beta tag on the MySQL feature in cloud. And once we have the snapshot stuff out and a backup story more mature, then I think we'll call that GA. You know, we just didn't want to call it GA without the ability to back up in our store. Yeah. Matt Stauffer So it's not like the database itself is in beta, right? Like if you're just using a database somewhere else, you can use database here. It's just you guys, you have like a higher kind of standard. ([Time 0:09:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e5b54b20-3859-489a-b8e5-8953f79dfa07)) - **Forge Continues Major Investments** - Forge remains crucial with over half a million managed servers and tens of thousands of customers. - Laravel is investing in a large Forge update including deployment improvements and unifying with Envoy. Transcript: Matt Stauffer And you know, like, is this something you're to keep investing in? And you mentioned that, you know, then you said, yeah, that's something we're interested in. But you said there's kind of like, you guys have kind of leaked ideas about like, there's new kind of forge development happening. So can you tell us a little about like, you know, as much as you're able to share about forge right now? Taylor Otwell Yeah, you know, I'm a huge forge fan. Of course, forge will always be super important to me as like my first commercial product i ever really built that like let me go full time working on laravel we're doing more on forge Right now and more ambitious things than we've i would say ever done or at least in the last let's say five to six years way beyond anything we've ever tackled so i mean from my perspective At the end of the day, like the proof that Forge is a good product is in the fact that it's managing over half a million servers and tens of thousands of customers. Like clearly this is something people want and enjoy and like. And I think it would be really silly and kind of negligent to dislike, say, oh, we're actually done with Forge. We're going all in on cloud so we have some super exciting new projects for forge i mean i can just say that part of it you know i put out a tweet maybe a week or two ago of like hey if you're interested In forge come to laricon us because we're going to be showing all of this new forge stuff which is all true and if if you are interested in forge laricon us is definitely going to be an exciting Time but you know a lot of people guessed a lot of stuff a lot of it was correct people were missing a lot of stuff as well that i i don't think they would ever guess actually that's just like I think going to be kind of surprising to people but you know i mean a lot of stuff that's probably top of mind for everyone like we know we want to improve and solidify or maybe like unify The feature set between like envoyer and forge i think that's like a super obvious one that people have talked about for years so i mean i feel pretty comfortable saying that like since 90 of the people guess that like obviously that is something we have been working on trying to improve the deployment story to be more in line with on voyeur in terms of zero downtime and Kind of monitoring and things like that but there's a lot more we're doing for forge as well that people like i said not a single person guessed on twitter at all. ([Time 0:11:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/503bf5dc-acc4-4f62-9b34-0bc33a0b1a67)) - **Nightwatch Powers Forge Debugging** - Nightwatch runs on Forge production and gives real-time visibility into logs linked to user requests. - Taylor finds it beautifully designed and effective for debugging without the usual complexity. Transcript: Taylor Otwell So i mean the way i actually interact with nightwatch the most in a real way is actually via forge's nightwatch installation so just may i mention this if she was on with you but you know We've been running nightwatch on forge and production for feels like forever now i mean it's been a couple months i think at least yeah and like I log into that and I see the real Forge data Into Nightwatch. And to me, it feels like kind of a finished Nightwatch because I'm seeing everything real. You know, it's not any dummy data or anything. And it's just really like, it's such a beautifully designed product and it's such a step above like, man, just like I've never even really set up true log monitoring for any of my lab projects Because it was just like i just knew it was going to be nasty and it's going to be ugly and i didn't want to do it and with night watch it's just like boom i pop in the night watch agent into my Composer file and i'm done and everything works and it looks good and i can search and i can you know what's actually super cool for me is like being able to go to a user in Nightwatch, like A user of my app, a Forge user. I can see the requests they're making, but then on any of those requests, I can see the logs that were written just for that request. And you know, that's like, that's just such a pain to dig into. Like if you were going into like the CloudWatch dashboard on AWS, just being able to quickly do that, it'd just be nasty. ([Time 0:15:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56f5195f-3c56-438c-a8c7-3f8544807651)) - **Nightwatch Ready for Instant Production Use** - Nightwatch can be launched on high-traffic production apps immediately without migration. - This readiness contrasts with Laravel Cloud’s slower migration for complex apps. Transcript: Taylor Otwell And I think, you know, in contrast to cloud and something that I'm super excited about on Nightwatch is, you know, when we launched cloud, like I said earlier, everyone could kind of Get in and play with it on day one. But most people weren't moving their production apps to Laravel cloud in the first 24 hours of cloud's launch, especially if they were non-trivial applications. But with Nightwatch, you know, even if your site's doing millions and millions of hits a day, you really can launch Nightwatch into production on that app on launch day. And we're ready for it, you know, in terms of scale and the ability to handle that. And, you know, there's no migration needed on your end. It's really just a composer package you install and a little process you run just like you'd run a QWork or anything else. ([Time 0:17:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33bd2aaf-eeb6-4a51-85c2-09a43906f581)) - **Nightwatch Handles Massive Scale** - Nightwatch captured three billion database queries in the first 30 days on Forge alone. - Sampling options allow scaling to billions of requests without overwhelming data. Transcript: Taylor Otwell I think in the 30 days that we ran the first 30 days we ran night awesome forge i think just for database queries we collected three billion oh my gosh Is that just Forge alone? Tracked by Forge alone. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's just queries. That's not, you know, requests or exceptions or anything. But you know, people will also be able to just sample down. So one thing we're working on is that's assuming you capture like 100% of everything that happens in your app. You don't have to do that. So like if your app gets billions of requests, you literally might only sample 0.1% of the data coming in. But it's enough to still let you know like what your slowest queries and slowest rates are. ([Time 0:19:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc521e58-a701-4a38-8e94-40e748db1552)) - **Nightwatch Offers Holistic Debugging** - Nightwatch’s integration delivers structured logs combined with user and request context. - This holistic data reveals critical errors and user issues that standalone logs miss. Transcript: Matt Stauffer This feels magical to be able to say like that user right there had an error on that page that user right there had three you know 300 type errors and you know 400 type errors and we want to Dig these or there's you know here's the routes that have the most 500 type errors i'm just like this is an insane it shouldn't that magical. Taylor Otwell Yeah. It's super useful to be able to see stuff like that, especially even like your P95 values in Nightwatch. So these are like what you might think of as the outliers in your app in terms of performance. But in many cases, they're actually your most valuable customer. They're maybe your biggest spenders because they have the most resources on your system. Like take, for example, Forge itself. If we had a user with a thousand servers, they're one of potentially our biggest potential customers. And, you know, even though the dashboard might be really slow for them and we're not really seeing that, you might discount it because like, oh, P95, it's rare, but it could be like a really Valuable customer and being able to visualize that kind of stuff really easily and not watch is super, super useful. Matt Stauffer Yeah. Yeah. I was just saying it feels very magical. And I don't want to say that in like a sales hype way, but it feels very magical in that we have been working on this logging, tracking, analytics, you know, debugging world for so long And never been able to get anything like this. It really feels like a because what I thought we were going to get was like a Laravel branded error management platform. OK, cool. Your management is error management, your exception tracking platform. ([Time 0:20:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e9349051-2cfa-453a-9683-485f61025f94)) - **Laracon's Power Is Community** - Laracon thrives on social connections more than the talks themselves. - Taylor empowers his team but still contributes on speaker selection and venue advice for quality. Transcript: Matt Stauffer The Laracon hype is definitely starting. We got the new site that launched, I think just today, you know, I know that as a sponsor, we're starting to get kind of sponsor communications. I just listen to mostly technical and they're talking about a pre party the day beforehand. And I know there's a lot of other stuff going on. Once again, I have to ask you, because I'm most curious about your perspective of things. You've run Laracon solo. You've run Laracons with Ian. You've run Laracons with Jess. You know, you've had all these different experiences. And last year, you had the burgeoning kind of like team, you know, helping run Laracon with you. How hands on are you? What's your experience been like? You know, what's, yeah. Taylor Otwell I have tried to be pretty hands-off this year because i mean oh gosh hopefully the team's not mad at me but i wanted to see like how they did you know like without me guiding every step of What they do you know what i mean because it's true like i mean especially like years like 2016 17 18 19 we ran those with no event management company at all. It was usually me and one other person or two other people maybe. And we just kind of made it happen. The last couple of years we've used an event management company, but there's still a lot you have to do and a lot to figure out. So where like I have contributed my general feedback and kind of opinions on venue and where we do it. And a lot of that ends up coming down to just sort of like cost and what date stuff is available. And some of it's a little bit out of your control, to be honest, depending on what's kind of booked up at the time. And so I contributed there and I also contributed to helping select the speakers, right? Because I just can give a lot of context you know, what topics we might want and how to kind of balance it all out and stuff like that. But other than that, I have not really contributed to like, even like, for example, last week, I pinged Hank, who's on our team working on this, says, hey, like, what does the stage look Like at Laracon? You know, because I normally, that's something I would be like super heavily involved in. And I just hadn't looked and he sent me up a mock-up and like, it looked okay. That looks great. So good. We're like on the right track, you know, we're like, Hey, what's the catering looking like? But I'm honestly not, I'm trying not to micromanage it because, you know, but it's really part of a broader effort across where I've out where I'm trying to find a balance between like Really steering everyone in this very micromanagery way versus trying to get Laravel to a place to where it can function without me doing that because it hasn't for so long because I Was kind of running like every decision because you know I want to be able to eventually like take a vacay and not yeah log log in like let's say if that's the benchmark yeah you know and We're not there yet but we're getting close to that you know what i mean that's great and i want other people to be able to find to have fun and flourish too right like if you're working somewhere You want to be able to contribute and like make an impact on what actually happens. You know, you don't want to just be like, sort of carrying out the wishes of like a ruler and you have no creative input on the whole process. So I'm trying to let them have fun with it too, because it is fun running an event, you know, and kind of seeing it all come together. And then you're there in person. It's like, wow, we spent many months kind of dreaming this up. And now it's like this real tangible thing, which we don't get to do often in software, right? It's like, see these tangible results of projects we've worked on with cool staging and lighting. ([Time 0:23:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/92f02f92-0de4-449c-a1a9-7960c95dad39)) - **Value of In-Person Conferences** - Matt Stauffer begged Taylor to bring Laracon back in person after pandemic loss. - He emphasizes the irreplaceable value of social interaction beyond watching talks online. Transcript: Matt Stauffer I you know, I've been with Titan since the beginning with Laravel since, you know, version three, blah, blah, blah. And he's never been to a conference. And I've just kind of realized that there are some people who haven't yet been able to see the value of going to these conferences. And so I just want to kind of like tell everybody since I'm not invested, I get no dollars from Laracon or anything like that. When we lost those physical conferences for a few years, I and several others begged Taylor to put it on in person again, I was just like, please, you know, like whatever it takes, there's So much value because the conferences aren't about the talks. And I'm sorry to speakers as a speaker, you know, like, you know, the talks are great and the conference wouldn't happen without the talks. So they are there and they're wonderful. But a lot of people say, oh, I can watch the talks on YouTube. Therefore, I don't need to go. And I'm like, the talks are the organizing concept and reason for it to exist. And yet the reason to go in person is the social interactions. It is meeting people. It's even just being there with those conference speakers and asking questions about their talk afterwards. It's about the people you sit next to, the people you go to a meal with, the people you play foosball with or whatever, the connection, the sponsored people that you meet in person. I mean, like there's so many developers who came up to our booth and I was like, oh, I kind of vaguely know your face or name from Twitter, but then we sit and have an in-person conversation. It just changes our connection. And I'm like, I know not everybody can afford it, but if it is within the realm of what you can handle financially, don't look at these conferences as sitting in a seat, watching a talk, Because you're right, you can just sit in your seat at home for a lot cheaper and a lot more comfortable and watch, you know, talks on YouTube. Think of it as a social experience that happens to be centered around talks. ([Time 0:32:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/631ce722-df2d-437e-b3a3-af7614206d01)) - **Laracon Enables Speaker-Attendee Mingling** - Laracon speakers and team mingle freely with attendees throughout the event. - This accessibility fosters genuine connections rarely found at other tech conferences. Transcript: Taylor Otwell And one thing i appreciate about lara con and shout out to uh rails world was kind of like this too with like david hundermeyer henson just hanging out like yeah out in the lobby yeah and At lara con it's the very same way like you're gonna see like people you see online, like Nuno or James Brooks from the Forge team or me. I always try to hang out like in the crowd, the whole conference, I'm eating lunch. I'm there to standing around for anyone to talk to. So it's a good opportunity to come meet and talk with the L'Anneville team as well. ([Time 0:35:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f3b04c3c-6ffc-4f64-bef3-b3013c53deb2))