How to prevent large responses to trigger 502 errors

When using Laravel as your preferred framework, you might want to scale your application by transition it to a serverless platform like AWS Lambda.

The easier way of doing this is either by using Bref PHP or Laravel Vapor (which is more a SaaS).

Either way, if you are using Laravel in your application you should know a couple of things.

Cloudflare is not a solution

Cloudflare is a very good service that brings a lot of good performance and security things out of the box and for free.

The issue with Cloudflare is that it doesn't solve the problem when an Amazon Lambda response payload coming from a function call is bigger than 10 megabytes, API Gateway which is the service in between your Lambda function and the user will reject that response returning a 502 error to the user.

This cannot be increased from the AWS console, therefore you should consider other solutions than Cloudflare's.

Decreasing response size doesn't always work

As Laravel Vapor describes on its documentation pages this error can be multiple things, be aware of that.

Doing as they say by searching by "Task timed out" in your CloudWatch's function log stream will help you identify if this is a problem with response size or something else.

TL;DR

Solving this problem is easier than you think, but sometimes can become a pain, specially if your responses normally are way bigger than 10MB, then you must consider other solution.

For this purpose is that we've developed a Laravel package that acts as a middleware, to compress the response before leaving the Laravel request lifecycle.

Hope this helps your projects.