Like everyone else yesterday I head the news that Laravel had raised $57m from Accel.
I was happy to see an investment in the framework that I have chosen for the majority of projects over the past 10 years.
I was also however a little concerned, exactly how this investment might affect the development of the open source project I use every day.
After watching the “special announcement” and the “Q and A” that followed it, my fears have been quashed.
When I started using Laravel
I stared investigating Laravel in 2011, shortly after it was publicly released, and fell in love immediately.
It took a little time to convince clients to use it, but I started using it for personal projects right away.
Since then I’ve built over 50 personal projects using Laravel, and numerous very large client projects.
What's the investment for?
The best I can say about this investment, is that it appears that nothing much will change. Taylor is still reviewing PRs every day, helping to maintain cohesion between the Framework and all the first party packages.
In fact the investment was made at the start of the year, and announced just recently, so we could see the fruits of that investment. Laravel Cloud sounds like a great platform for hosting Laravel applications, and may not have been possible without the investment from Accel.
Building this kind of hosting platform requires significant investment in both hardware and people. The design and development of the platform will (and perhaps already has) lead to significant improvements of the framework, defer anyone?
Taylor has already teased additional products, the next to be announced at Laracon AU in November, with the additional resources I don’t expect a flood of new products, but a significant uptick in improvements to the existing offerings.
Laravel Forge for example, which I use as my primary hosting (along with Digital Ocean) is getting some much need love. Not only is this great for me, but another sign that the hosting vendor lock-in that some feared after the announcement will not be a problem. You are still free to host your projects how you wish.
What does this all mean for me and my projects?
Soon everyone will have a new, more powerful, hosting option for our Laravel projects. Something designed and built specifically for Laravel.
The investment is a great sign that people outside of the development community see great value in the Laravel ecosystem.
It had been difficult to convince clients (and even some potential collaborators) to use Laravel in the past, while this has been getting easier with this investment, I’m expecting most objections to go away.
Laravel will continue to be my preferred choice for building projects.
Congratulations to Taylor, and the rest of the Laravel team. You've built something amazing, that keeps getting better with each version, keep it up!