Laravel Vapor: Serverless Laravel on AWS

Serverless Laravel

Laravel Vapor brings serverless deployment to Laravel, running your application on AWS Lambda. No servers to manage, automatic scaling, and pay-per-request pricing make it attractive for many workloads.

Getting Started

composer require laravel/vapor-core --update-with-dependencies
npm install -g @laravel/vapor-cli
vapor login

vapor.yml Configuration

id: my-app
name: my-app
environments:
    production:
        memory: 1024
        cli-memory: 512
        runtime: php-8.3:al2
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'
            - 'npm ci && npm run build'
        deploy:
            - 'php artisan migrate --force'
        queues:
            - default
        scheduler: true
        database: my-database
        cache: my-cache

Deployment

vapor deploy production

Understanding Lambda Constraints

Lambda functions have limitations to consider:

• 15-minute maximum execution time
• 512MB-10GB memory
• Stateless execution (no persistent connections)
• Cold starts on idle functions

Handling File Uploads

Lambda has a 6MB request payload limit. Use signed uploads for larger files:

// Generate signed URL
$url = Storage::temporaryUploadUrl(
    'uploads/' . Str::uuid() . '.pdf',
    now()->addMinutes(5)
);

// Client uploads directly to S3
// Then notifies your app of the upload location

Database Connections

Use RDS Proxy to manage database connections efficiently with Lambda's scaling behavior:

// vapor.yml
environments:
    production:
        database: my-db
        database-proxy: true

Queues with SQS

// vapor.yml
environments:
    production:
        queues:
            - default: 50  # Max concurrent jobs
            - emails: 10
        queue-memory: 1024

Reducing Cold Starts

// vapor.yml
environments:
    production:
        warm: 10  # Keep 10 warm instances

Monitoring

Vapor provides a dashboard for monitoring deployments, queue health, and function metrics. Integrate with CloudWatch for deeper insights.

Cost Optimization

Lambda charges per invocation and GB-second of compute. Optimize by:

• Right-sizing memory (affects CPU)
• Minimizing cold starts with warming
• Using queues for background work
• Caching aggressively

Conclusion

Vapor makes serverless Laravel deployment straightforward. For applications with variable traffic or where you want to avoid server management, it's an excellent choice. Understand the constraints and design accordingly.