Every successful Laravel application eventually needs to scale. Here's the roadmap we follow.
Phase 1: Optimization (0-10K visitors/day)
Before adding infrastructure complexity, optimize what you have:
- Enable query caching and view caching
- Implement eager loading to eliminate N+1 queries
- Add indexes to frequently queried columns
- Use Laravel's built-in caching for expensive operations
- Enable OPcache for PHP bytecode caching
Phase 2: Queue Everything (10K-100K visitors/day)
Move slow operations to queues:
- Email sending, report generation, image processing
- Use Redis as your queue driver
- Implement Laravel Horizon for queue management
Phase 3: Database Scaling (100K-500K visitors/day)
Your database becomes the bottleneck:
- Implement read replicas
- Use Laravel's database read/write connections
- Add Redis for session caching and full-page caching
- Consider sharding for high-traffic tables
Phase 4: Horizontal Scaling (500K+ visitors/day)
Your application servers need to scale horizontally:
- Move from a single server to a load-balanced cluster
- Use shared Redis for sessions and cache across servers
- Horizontal scaling works well when your database is optimized
- Consider Kubernetes for container orchestration
Don't Over-Engineer
You probably don't need Kubernetes on day one. Scale incrementally. Premature scaling adds complexity without corresponding benefits. Let your actual traffic patterns guide your infrastructure decisions.