SymfonyCloud: from Early Access to General Availability

After two years of development and years of R&D with our partners: the technology behind SymfonyCloud is now production ready. We are thus super happy to announce the general availability of SymfonyCloud!

Ryan Weaver, Symfony Core Team member and SymfonyCasts founder:

Thanks to SymfonyCloud, we deleted thousands of lines of infrastructure config. What did we get in return? More reliable deployments, faster response times, automatic security upgrades, true staging environments & endless debugging tools. It’s made for Symfony apps, which means it handles a lot of details for us. But we also extended it hard: microservices that talk to each other, Elasticsearch, Redis, multiple databases & even some crazy things with workers & custom video processing tools. SymfonyCloud makes doing all of this (with a small team and no sys-admins) possible.

Damien Alexandre, French consultant at JoliCode, PHP and Elasticsearch expert:

Currently playing with @symfony Cloud for a new project

• basic setup deployed in a couple of hours;
• great configuration format;
• no ops, no admin-sys;
• even managed to run the @redirectionio agent, thanks to @tucksaun

So far, so good

SymfonyCloud, our PaaS optimized for Symfony applications, has been unveiled last December. Since then, we have opened registration for Early Access to the platform on a daily basis. We gathered a lot of feedback during the last six months of Early Access. It allowed us to improve the product a lot: UI, DX, documentation, support, and billing.

This might not be easy for everyone not involved in SymfonyCloud development to follow everything that happened during the last months so today I would like to share with you some of our achievements.

SymfonyCloud is a fully-managed platform created by friendly Symfony developers for busy Symfony developers. It is the best way to host your Symfony applications. It tightly integrates with Symfony's best practices and development workflow to give you the tools to develop locally with comfort and deploy with confidence. This is especially true for the latest versions of Symfony 4 with the Built-In Environment Variable Processors, workers implementation (to manage the queues in the Messenger component) or RabbitMQ Management UI enabled by default just like any other supported services (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Influx DB, Solr, Varnish, and Kafka...).

SymfonyCloud allows you to completely define and configure the topology and services you want to use on your projects. Unlike other PaaS services, SymfonyCloud is batteries included which means that you don't need to subscribe to external services to get a cache or a search engine. And that those services are managed. When you back up your project, all of the services are backed-up. It also guarantees full compatibility with the Symfony CLI local web server to test locally your services from production.

A perfect use-case of SymfonyCloud is symfony.com!

The symfony.com website is hosted on SymfonyCloud since the opening of the Early Access registration. It totally changed the way we hosted the website before and allowed us to:

• Get more people being able to deploy;

• Work on an exact replica of our production environment to add new features and work bug fixes. For instance, we were super confident to update to Symfony 4.3 as we could test everything!

• Considerably simplify the deployment coordination (everything is now configured in 1 file of less than 200 lines of YAML);

• Change only 1 line in the config (well to be correct, just 1 number actually) to update PHP 7.1 to 7.3;

• Cut off the deployment downtime to 0 (no need anymore to wait to access the website during its deployment).

SymfonyCloud brings you simplicity and confidence in your infrastructure management:

• Describe your infrastructure
• Deploy continuously
• Synchronize your app data and services

Titouan Galopin, Symfony developer:

At En Marche (a French political party), we were used to rely on Kubernetes on Google Cloud to orchestrate and manage our Symfony applications. We invested a lot of time and resources into building a scalable and reliable environment with it.

However, as the party grew, we had less and less time to dedicate to infrastructure. When we launched the European elections campaign in December 2018, we decided to switch to SymfonyCloud. The result was outstanding: we got the same level of scalability and reliability, with additional flexibility, zero-downtime deployment, dropping thousands of lines of YAML and for a cheaper price. Everything became much simpler in an instant.

But in my opinion, what’s even more interesting is how SymfonyCloud helped us organize our IT department around the needs of the different other departments. By being able to host different Git branches in parallel on different URLs, we were able to work on the same project for both the legal department, the political department and the accounting, iterating on three different features in parallel with different interlocutors. This alone saved us dozens of meetings and hundreds of hours of many people across the entire organization.

Deploy today, get started now with SymfonyCloud!