Serverless PHP with Matthieu Napoli - Compiled Conversations

Matthieu Napoli, creator of Bref, joins us to explore the journey of bringing PHP to AWS Lambda - and making serverless a reality for everyday PHP developers. From hacking runtimes to building a mature ecosystem, Matthieu unpacks what “serverless” really means in practice - beyond the hype.

We dig into Bref’s architecture, its integration with Laravel and Symfony, why PHP fits so naturally into Lambda’s execution model, and what it takes to run scalable, queue-driven applications without managing infrastructure. Matthieu also shares the story behind Bref Cloud - a new deployment and monitoring platform built to simplify the AWS experience for teams of all sizes, while staying open, secure, and extensible.

Along the way, we dive into the trade-offs between serverless and Kubernetes, the importance of developer experience in platform design, and how Bref stays flexible - whether you’re shipping a side project or scaling production workloads.

This conversation is packed with practical insight into the past, present, and future of serverless PHP - from cold starts and containers to deployment patterns, open source sustainability, and what it takes to keep PHP evolving in the cloud era.

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