The Laravel team just announced that they are planning to release Laravel 8 on September 8th, and they are expecting the upgrade time to be about 10-15 minutes from Laravel 7.x.
Since Laravel 6, the framework has switched to semantic versioning and follows a designated release process. This means that every 6 months is a new first number release (6.0, 7.0, 8.0, etc), and in between is patch releases.
Laravel 8 is going to feature some nice new additions including an improved maintenance mode, no longer having to manually restart php artisan serve if you update your .env file, a new Bus::dispatch, a big refactor to factories and seeders, and a few more bigger features that haven’t been announced yet.
Taylor will be going through Laravel 8 at Laracon on August 26th, so be sure and get your ticket and watch it live.