Getting Started with Serverless PHP

These are the slides from a talk given at LonghornPHP 2022.

Some of us love to manage servers. But for a lot of PHP developers, servers are something we'd rather avoid. We're happy to pay hosting providers so we don't have to worry about it.

PHP hosting doesn't remove all your hosting headaches. You still have to worry about scaling. You're often overpaying for hosting because you have to worry about the worst-case scenario.

Well, that's what serverless PHP tries to solve. With serverless PHP, you only pay for what you use. Meanwhile, you get an infrastructure that can scale from handling zero traffic to thousands in seconds.

This talk will go over serverless PHP and how it works. We'll then look at the state of serverless in the PHP ecosystem. We'll finish by going over tools and projects you can use to deploy your PHP application on AWS Lambda.

You can read the companion article at: https://blog.ymirapp.com/getting-started-serverless-php

Transcript

1. Getting Started with Serverless PHP
2. 2 Heya! 2 I’m Carl Alexander @twigpress carlalexander.ca
3. “Servers. Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them.” - PHP developer (when a server blows up)
4. Server management
5. Still responsible
6. Platform as a service
7. Still need to over provision
8. Serverless addresses these problems
9. 1 What Is Serverless?
10. “Are there really no servers with serverless!?” - Literally everyone I mention serverless to
12. Marketing term
13. Functions as a Service
14. On-demand computing
15. Upload code to a cloud provider
16. Code gets executed in response to an event
17. No mention of servers
18. Outside your sphere of concerns
19. 2How Serverless PHP Works
20. PHP with a web server
22. How does serverless PHP compare?
23. Both run code in response to an event
24. So what’s different?
25. Not just PHP that runs without a server
26. Everything is serverless
27. Service based architecture
29. PHP runtime?
30. Unique element of serverless PHP
31. What does it do?
32. Processes lambda event
33. Figures out what the event wants
34. Sends a result back (HTTP response)
35. Mimics a web server
36. Request a file, returns a file
37. Creates FastCGI request, sends it to PHP-FPM
38. Also manages the PHP-FPM process
39. Stops the Lambda function after X requests
40. Only one PHP-FPM worker
41. Lambda only handles one event at a time
42. Why PHP-FPM?
43. Faster to have a running PHP process
44. ?Questions
45. 3Advantages of serverless PHP
47. No servers to manage
48. Not everyone is comfortable with servers
49. Still responsible
50. PaaS solves this issue
51. New problem. Scaling.
52. Slow or not automated
53. Each Lambda function is a PHP worker
55. Scaling in seconds not minutes
57. Need to plan for the worst with servers
58. How much would that cost?
59. None of that with serverless
60. Usage based pricing
61. Pay when your workers run
62. Charged by the millisecond
63. externals.io
64. $50/m -> $~17/m ($16/m is RDS)
65. 4Drawbacks of Serverless PHP
67. Less predictable cost
68. Paying for a server feels safe
69. $X/month
70. Need more performance? Pay more!
72. How many requests? Average duration?
73. Stressful and harder to budget for
74. Costs less
75. What happens with constant load?
76. Serverless not as attractive
77. Possible to maximize server usage
78. Optimal server might cost less
79. AWS lock-in
81. Why not Azure or GCP?
82. Not interchangeable
83. Not just Lambda
84. Need other services
85. Equivalent ≠ Same
86. Energy with AWS
87. Final note
88. Tempting to only compare cost
89. “Serverless is expensive. I could just get a $5/month droplet from DigitalOcean.” - Someone comfortable with servers
90. Dishonest
91. Intangible costs
92. Mental health
93. Your time
94. Be honest when you evaluate both options
95. ?Questions
96. 5Tools and Projects
97. Where do you start?
98. 98 Bref 7 https://bref.sh
99. Open source project
100. Mathieu Napoli
101. PHP runtime
102. Integrates with Symfony & Laravel
103. Deploy with Serverless framework
104. Extensive documentation
105. 105 Laravel Vapor 7 https://vapor.laravel.com
106. Builds off Bref
107. Deploys serverless Laravel applications
108. Manages your entire serverless infrastructure
110. Good documentation
111. serverlesslaravelcourse.com
112. Paid product ($39/m + AWS bill)
113. 113 7 Ymir https://ymirapp.com
114. - Carl Alexander 👋 “This is amazing! I need to build this for WordPress.”
115. Vapor for WordPress
116. Does WordPress specific things
117. HTML caching at edge
118. Image optimizing CDN
119. Same cost as Vapor
120. 120 Sidecar 7 https://github.com/ hammerstonedev/sidecar (Bonus!)
121. 6Back to Simplicity
122. PHP is so easy to use
123. Hosting used to be simpler
124. Serverless is deploy and forget
125. Levels playing field
126. ?Questions
127. 127 Thank you! 2 @twigpress carlalexander.ca joind.in/talk/f8b79