We're running Rust on Laravel Cloud and it's terrifyingly awesome

Sputnik aggregates and transcribes millions of podcasts and newsletters, and running search on that amount of data can get real expensive for little bootstrapped me.

So we use Quickwit, a search engine written in Rust.

The cool thing about Quickwit is that it scales like a motha. It stores the data on S3 style buckets, it stores its index on S3 style buckets, so it's very cheap to scale up. It's written in Rust so it's really memory efficient, so you don't need a large box either. Queries are a little slower than a typical search product, but our main use case is agents using the search, and whether a search takes 10ms or 80ms doesn't make that much difference to them in the bigger picture.

So cheap and cheerful. I like it.

I was running Quickwit on DigitalOcean, which is OK but far from great. It doesn't let me scale down a droplet easily. There's no scale to zero. The UI is annoying.

When Laracon US announced Cloud support for NextJS, Ruby on Rails, Go, I was like YES! Let's get Rust going. It wasn't supported yet so I asked Aaron who was super helpful and pointed me to Alfonso who was super helpful, they added me to the beta, and it just works!

The machines are ARM (Graviton), so you're building for aarch64. If you try this, ask to get into the beta, make your app listen on [::]:$PORT. I had it on 0.0.0.0 at first and Cloud's health check kept failing, because Cloud expects IPv6.

Why is it awesome?

1. Scales to zero my friends! Scales to mother** zero.

2. Trivially integrates with all the Laravel Cloud goodies. Add a cache. Add a database. That database scales to zero as well. And so on and so forth.

I'll say one more thing. I always was a Laravel developer. Since Claude Code got wildly good in December 2025, I've started doing some Python, doing some Rust. I'm running GPUs. I trained a BERT model. Nothing is scary anymore, and nothing takes 6 months of mistakes.

And so the whole direction of saying Laravel is a frame of mind more so than 1 particular language makes a ton of sense to me. The framework is still the absolute best way to do most of the typical features you need. But you need some Rust, some GO, some Python, whatever, go for it. The right tool for the job. Coding agents got so good that it's easy now, AND now we can host all that stuff on the same Laravel Cloud.

Onwards!

Learn more? https://multilang.laravel.cloud/ has a good showcase.