Adopting cloud use: ploi.cloud
When we talk about adopting the use of cloud services as someone who used to run their own systems then at least we're going to look a bit more careful at things like where the infrastructure is running, as an EU citizen maybe we also look at wether it is run by a European company.
This has been a bit of a painpoint on the topic for me: there are services out there that give you amazing developer experience, exactly what I'd like to use for a startup (or building a new product in an existing environment for that matter) - but then it's all very dominated by American companies. Be it vercel or laravel cloud, both are examples of that: surely amazing teams working on great platforms but there is the question of wether we can get something going in the EU. Additionally I believe that a market with some serious competition is genuinely good for all involved. There have long been good offerings here when it came to infrastructure, but the open question for me was about "but what if I want the developer experience of just connecting my GitHub repo and get a laravel app hosted in less than five minutes?" - and there I wasn't quite so sure.
What I recently tried is ploi.cloud, which comes from the makers of ploi.io - a service I would describe as a competitor to laravel forge - and thus a team with some experience in running and provisioning webapps.
I put a tiny test project (webhook-debugger.dev) on there, and the first impression already fits quite well: less than five minutes until having a running app is certainly achieved.
Also I get some fun graphics which I always enjoy, I'll admit being all in for a nice dashboard.
Features seem well positioned compared to other services:
- Hosting your app in a containerised way with auto-scaling
- MySQL or Postgres as database options
- Caching with Valkey, Redis and more
- Queue workers
- Deployments triggered by push to a given branch or by webhook
- S3 buckets, optional persistent storage being mounted to the containers, databases available with additional nodes
This is a bit of a first impressions post but so far https://ploi.cloud/ seems like a service to look at and that I was surprised that it wasn't on my radar yet.