Laravel Forge - Deploys a VPS on your own AWS/DigitalOcean/Hetzner/etc - https://forge.laravel.com/
Laravel Vapor - Deploys a serverless function on your AWS account to run your app/cron/queues https://vapor.laravel.com
Laravel Cloud - Differs because it doesn't run on your infrastructure, so less time to setup/configure.
Laravel forge - something breaks, you are responsible to fix it
Laravel vapor - something breaks, you are responsible to fix it
Laravel Cloud - something breaks and you can prove, that it's not you code? Someone else is responsible, awesome!
Most projects that use laravel are small shops. To sell them the convenience that they don't need to bother about infrastructure and uptime, is a smart move by laravel.
* Automatic Scaling
* Additional processes like queue workers, crons, ...
* Managing rollouts and rollbacks
* Managed infra (database, cache, ...)
* Multiple environments
* Persistent storage
* Backups
* Monitoring and health checks
* Logging and tracing
* Software updates for the underlying server(s)
* CDN
* Failover and redundancy
Just to name a few.Laravel Cloud is probably going to provide all of that out of the box. I think that could be attractive for a lot of people.
Plus if you're building apps for clients handing off the whole hosting side of things sounds amazing.
I've run PHP apps (but not Laravel apps) in production and the infrastructure and config never really occupied that much of my time. Is Laravel different in this way than running bare PHP? Is there a gap to fill here where existing cloud providers aren't?
[0] https://cloud.laravel.com/