Joining Laravel to Build Laravel Cloud
I am joining the Laravel team as Senior Infrastructure Engineer to help build Laravel Cloud. My cloud platform project is going on hold. Here is why this is the right move.
Last week I wrote about building a managed platform for PHP. Today I'm putting that project on hold.
I'm joining the Laravel team to help buildLaravel Cloud.
Why
Laravel Cloud is building exactly what I've been building: a managed platform for Laravel apps, with real understanding of PHP-FPM, queues, and the Laravel ecosystem. But they have the team and resources to ship it at scale. My project, as a one-person effort, was always going to be limited by how much I could build alone.
When I saw what the Laravel Cloud team was designing, the overlap with my own work was obvious. PHP-FPM optimization, metrics-driven scaling, container orchestration, queue management. The problems I've been solving with Init, FPM Exporter, and Queue Autoscale are the same problems Laravel Cloud is solving. Joining the team means I can work on these problems at a much larger scale, with a bigger team.
What happens to Cbox and the open source packages
Cbox isn't going anywhere. The consulting business continues. The open source packages remain maintained and MIT-licensed. Init, FPM Exporter, System Metrics, Queue Autoscale, and everything else will continue to receive updates. Thousands of devs use them and that doesn't change.
What is going on hold is the platform product. The packages work and they're in production. The commercial platform that ties them together is what I'm pausing. If and when I return to it, the foundation will still be there.
What I will be doing at Laravel
I'm starting as a contractor, with the plan to go full-time in January. My role is Senior Infrastructure Engineer, focused on the infrastructure layer that powers Laravel Cloud. Container orchestration, scaling, monitoring, the stuff I've been building at Cbox for years. Now I get to do it for the whole ecosystem.
I can't share specifics about what Laravel Cloud is building yet. Same philosophy as Cbox though: deep understanding of PHP workloads, metrics-driven decisions, and zero-config defaults that just work.
Looking forward
I'm excited about this. I've been building cloud infrastructure for five years and this is the best place to do it. The open source work continues. The blog continues. Just with a different day job.
See you on the other side.