Our Experience with Laravel Cloud (So Far)

As most of our readers know, we're firmly cemented in the Craft CMS ecosystem. With Craft’s recent announcement aligning more closely with the Laravel ecosystem, it’s clear that the center of gravity in the PHP world continues to shift.  For us, this isn’t about chasing trends - it’s about recognizing where the ecosystem is consolidating and making intentional decisions about how we build more complex systems going forward.

As we started leaning further into Laravel for more nuanced, application-heavy systems, the next question became infrastructure. If we’re committing to the framework, we want infrastructure that understands it deeply. We didn’t want to stitch together generic cloud services and rebuild deployment pipelines from scratch. We wanted tight Laravel integration - something that handles queues, workers, scaling, environment management, and deployments in a way that feels native rather than bolted on. That’s what led us to explore Laravel Cloud. If Laravel is becoming the center of gravity for Craft, then infrastructure purpose-built for Laravel deserves serious consideration.

Our experience with Laravel Cloud so far has been refreshingly straightforward. The initial setup - connecting a repository, provisioning a database, configuring environment variables - felt intentional and tightly integrated with how Laravel applications are actually structured. There’s a noticeable difference between infrastructure that merely hosts a Laravel app and infrastructure that understands how Laravel works. From day one, deployments felt native rather than improvised.

The deployment workflow in particular stood out. Git-based deploys are clean, predictable, and require very little ceremony. Environment management is simple, queues and workers are treated as first-class citizens, and scaling doesn’t require manually configuring load balancers or SSH’ing into servers. For application-heavy systems - especially ones with background jobs, scheduled tasks, or API-driven workloads - that reduction in operational overhead is meaningful. It lets us focus on application logic rather than infrastructure plumbing.

Laravel Cloud feels like an extension of the framework itself. The defaults are sensible, the developer experience is smooth, and the mental overhead is low. For complex applications where business logic is the priority, that tight integration is compelling.

Moving more complex systems to Laravel - backed by Laravel Cloud - has clarified how we think about architecture.

Historically, it’s tempting to push business logic deeper into a CMS simply because it’s already there. Craft is powerful, and Yii made a lot of that possible. But as application complexity grows - multi-step workflows, background processing, API integrations, multi-tenant logic - the CMS can become an application layer by accident. That’s rarely ideal long-term.

With Laravel becoming more central to our stack, we’re drawing cleaner lines.

Craft remains an exceptional content platform. When content modeling, editorial workflows, and structured publishing are the primary concern, it’s the right tool. But when business logic becomes the dominant layer - when the system behaves more like software than a website - Laravel gives us better primitives: queues, events, service layers, APIs, and scalable application architecture by design.

Laravel Cloud reinforces that separation. Because infrastructure is tightly aligned with the framework, we can confidently design applications assuming queues will scale, deployments will be consistent, and environment management won’t become a bottleneck. That reduces the temptation to over-consolidate responsibilities into a single system.

We’re not moving away from Craft - we’re evolving alongside the ecosystem. As Laravel’s gravity continues to shape modern PHP development, pairing it with Laravel Cloud gives us a streamlined path for building and scaling nuanced applications with confidence. The goal isn’t to standardize on one tool - it’s to choose the right foundation for each layer of a system. Increasingly, for application-heavy work, Laravel + Laravel Cloud feels like the right foundation.