Queue workers are where Laravel hosting usually gets fiddly. You guess a worker count, it's wrong at 9am and wasteful at 3am, and a heavy job slows down web requests on the same box. Laravel Cloud's managed queues have been tackling this since May, and in August they were rebuilt from scratch.
Also Read: Deploy Go, Express & Hono Apps on Laravel Cloud - How To's
Quick timeline
- 26 May 2026: managed queues go generally available. Cloud provisions the queue, runs workers on dedicated instances away from your web cluster, scales on backlog (including to zero) and adds a failed-jobs dashboard with one-click retry.
- 6 August 2026: version two, with a new runtime, FIFO queues and two compute classes.
What's new in the rebuild
Workers wake in under a second
On an idle queue, workers now wake in under a second when a job arrives. Previously that took many seconds (the changelog says about 15). That makes scale to zero realistic for queues that need to react quickly, such as sending a password-reset email.
Far fewer settings
Creating a queue now asks for four things: a name, a queue type, a memory size and an autoscaling range. Polling interval, visibility timeout and shutdown timeout are gone. Cloud now delivers each job to workers itself, so those values are measured rather than tuned by you.
FIFO queues
FIFO queues process jobs in the exact order they were dispatched. The August product update says they deliver each job exactly once as well. Use them for payments, ledger entries, stock adjustments and anything else where order matters.
Flex vs Pro compute
| Flex | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Scales to zero | Yes | No, always on |
| Cold starts | Sub-second | None |
| Best for | Bursty or occasional jobs | Steady throughput, latency-sensitive work |
| Long jobs | Standard | Up to one hour |
| Price | Same as previous queue compute | Always-on pricing |
You can also schedule extra capacity ahead of known busy periods, such as a product launch.
How to upgrade
Existing queues keep running unchanged. To move a queue to the new runtime:
- Update to a supported framework version: Laravel 11.55.0, 12.63.0 or 13.19.0 or newer.
- Pick a new Flex or Pro size in the queue's settings.
- Deploy.
If you were already on managed queues, a composer update and redeploy is enough to try the new version.
Detect Cloud from your code
Laravel 13 added a Cloud facade so your app can check where it's running:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cloud;
if (Cloud::hosted() && Cloud::usesManagedQueues()) {
$connection = Cloud::queue();
}
It's handy for packages or apps that also run on Forge or locally.
Pre-deploy warnings
Since 27 August, Cloud reads your composer.lock on every push and warns you when a feature you've enabled, including managed queues and scheduled tasks, needs a newer framework version. The notice clears as soon as you push the fix, without waiting for a deploy.
Limits to know
Managed queues are available to Laravel and Symfony (via Messenger) only. Next.js, Nuxt, Node, Go and Python apps need their own worker processes on a worker cluster.
FAQ
Does Laravel Cloud support FIFO queues? Yes, since August 2026. Jobs are processed in the order they were dispatched.
How long can a job run on Laravel Cloud? Up to one hour on the Pro compute class.
Which Laravel versions support the new managed queues? Laravel 11.55.0, 12.63.0, 13.19.0 and newer.
Related on The Web Tier
Sources: Laravel Cloud changelog (Managed Queues; Managed Queues Improvements; Pre-Deploy Package Checks) · Laravel August product updates · Laravel 13 changelog: Cloud facade · Everything we announced at Laracon US 2026
