Should You Use Laravel Vapor? A Practical Decision Guide

Laravel Vapor enables deploying Laravel applications on AWS Lambda, providing serverless infrastructure that scales automatically. But serverless is not the right choice for every project. Here is how to decide.

When Vapor Makes Sense

Unpredictable traffic patterns. If your application experiences significant traffic spikes (product launches, marketing campaigns, viral content), Vapor scales automatically without manual intervention or over-provisioning.

Cost optimization at variable load. You pay only for compute time actually used. Applications with quiet periods and burst activity benefit from not paying for idle servers.

Reduced operations burden. No servers to patch, no OS updates, no capacity planning. Vapor handles infrastructure so your team can focus on application code.

Multi-region deployment. Vapor simplifies deploying to multiple AWS regions for global applications.

When Vapor May Not Be Right

Consistent high traffic. If your application maintains steady, predictable load 24/7, traditional servers or containers may be more cost-effective than Lambda pricing.

Long-running processes. Lambda has a 15-minute execution timeout. Applications requiring longer processing times need alternative architectures for those specific tasks.

WebSocket requirements. Lambda does not natively support persistent WebSocket connections. You would need API Gateway WebSocket APIs or a separate service.

Team familiarity. If your team is comfortable with traditional server management and has no scaling pain, the learning curve of serverless may not justify the switch.

Cost Considerations

Vapor itself has a subscription fee plus AWS costs. For small applications with minimal traffic, a $5/month VPS may be significantly cheaper. For applications with variable traffic, Vapor often costs less than provisioning servers for peak capacity.

Run the numbers with your specific traffic patterns before deciding. AWS provides a Lambda pricing calculator that helps estimate costs.

Getting Started

If you decide Vapor is right:

1. Ensure your application follows Laravel conventions (Vapor handles deployment based on these)
2. Configure prewarming to minimize cold starts
3. Use SQS for queues rather than Redis (better fit for serverless)
4. Plan your database strategy -- RDS works but consider connection pooling via RDS Proxy

Vapor excels when the operational simplicity of serverless aligns with your application's requirements and traffic patterns. Evaluate based on your specific needs rather than hype.