When is it inappropriate to say “Happy New Year!” after the new year? March? April? The product engineering side of the house was away to ponder that question last week. This means that the infra engineers got to play. 

Much like actual train systems, sometimes core systems require as much care and attention as the trains themselves and this week was making sure that the low level systems that handle your code → deploy experience are in top shape.

In this changelog, we will provide a bit of the behind the scenes view on the foundational pieces of work our Infrastructure team shipped to support your applications. (And how it’s relevant to you.)

Railway now processes a million builds per month. It’s an impressive feat considering we crossed that mark after a year of existence. So many of you believe in our vision to simplify infrastructure. It also seems that you are also telling your friends. This means we are on track to surpass that figure by 10x within the next three months.

In addition to more compute, this has required a holistic look at our builder architecture to deliver a better build and deploy experience. We want Railway to be deterministic, extendable, and quick. Nixpacks helps expose those preferences around your code and gives our builder a recipe to follow. But our builder needs to ensure that those recipes are given to chefs who have the time and care to cook your code al dente.

 is working dutifully on builds. He’s shipped multiple improvements to builder scheduling, caching, and maintainability. All this is done in the service so that your code builds when you push your code. No questions asked. We spun up 2x the number of available builders, moved to faster storage, and are now using a newer form of image repository to ensure that follow-on builds are even faster.

We really should make an engineering blog post about this…

Since we didn’t expect to ship any major customer facing features this last week, this meant it was prime time to move Railway to Kubernetes.

You're probably wondering how we got here.

Railway, until now, was scheduling builds, deployments, and updates to state, all with a home-rolled queuing/scheduling system. Therefore, we salute and respect the prior system while understanding that it was time for it to go out to the pasture.

Whenever someone would ask us for a feature that would violate a core assumption of that system 

 - we’d look at our Infra, subsequently sigh, and then deliver the bad news to them.

Railway now has new internal APIs to handle the deployment lifecycle. Previously, methods were being called in places they shouldn’t have been. Those methods are cleaned up in newer APIs. We viciously attacked latency in services and our DBs. 

There are two parts to Railway, the dashboard, which is what you see, and our platform a.k.a what you don’t see. We’ll talk about the platform now.

Regarding the platform, we realized that we needed better tooling to support a mesh that provisions internal infra intelligently (practically: scaling the dashboard + assorted APIs) and better systems around scheduling new workloads. This is a shoo-in for a quality K8s/TF configuration, enabling more complex infra configurations. In practice we can now have the same workload networked across different hosts, giving your service (optional) High Availability. It’s really cool.

We want to shout out Five, Charith, and Khue, who have worked tirelessly to ensure these upgrades got out to you. You’ll hear more from them later about our platform and the excellent work they’ve been doing.

Remember our planning effort mentioned a few changelogs ago? Our plans are now looking like 

, which gives us enough confidence to share what you can expect from us in the next quarter. 

More and more developers, startups, and companies are trusting Railway with their workloads. We know that they need these core features for them to be even more successful than they are today. We are aiming for these marquee items to ship by next quarter. 

Fixed a very annoying email unsubscribe bug.  

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1673309281/docs/platform-upgrades_xexsse.png

Platform Signal Upgrades, Infra Overhaul, Future Plans

Changelog #0115