Changelog #0183

If you’ve been riding with us for a while, you know that we’ve long been preparing to rack-and-stack our own servers, storage, and networking gear.

Why’s that, you might ask?

Simple: We can offer better application performance, better connectivity, better reliability, and better pricing if we own the full stack.

So this is to say that it’s a very special week around here as we’ve just plugged-in our first Railway server in our first Railway data center!

(In case you’re wondering, there will be absolutely no impact to your workloads anytime soon and when the rollout does come it will be carefully staged.)

It’s easy to get ahead of ourselves, but we’re so excited to bring you more news on this front when the time is right.

For the moment though, we’re excited to get started.

Now let’s get into this week’s changelog!

Startup Program Accelerating

Attention Passengers: The Railway Startup Program is now in service.

We mentioned it in passing last week, but in case you missed it, Railway now has a startup program.

For the first rollout of this program, we’re offering $5K in Railway credits to startups that meet certain criteria:

• $2M - $25M in outside funding
• Founded in 2020 or later
• New to Railway or less than $100 in lifetime platform spend

Since we’ve received a number of questions/comments about this program in the past week, let’s do a special mini changelog Q&A.

Q. Why funded startups? Why not bootstrapped ones?

A. Two reasons: One, this is the first iteration of this program and we’re likely to expand it down the line. Two, to get this program up and running quickly, we’re using funding as an external signal that a company is in “growth” mode for which we think this program is a fit. We’re terribly sorry if this doesn’t include your company at the moment but as mentioned we’ll likely be expanding the program down the line.

Q. Can we apply if we’ve already been on the platform for some time?

A. Yes, but we’re limiting this rollout to companies that have less than $100 in lifetime platform spend to make it easier for companies that might otherwise be evaluating Railway for production workloads.

Q. When will we hear back about our application?

A: We’re processing applications as fast as we can! You can expect to hear back within a few days of applying.

Any other questions? Let us know on Twitter.

Dashboard Improvements

We’ve been busy this week making a number of speedups to the dashboard for large projects.

In particular, you should notice:

• Faster loads if you have large numbers of services
• Faster loads if you large numbers of environments

There’s still plenty left to razor away and we’ll be bringing some further speed improvements to you in the coming weeks.

Still banging your head on the keyboard waiting for your services to load? Let us know!

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While we’re on the subject of the dashboard, we’ve also shipped a new workflow for first-time database creates!

When creating a database it’s now easier to access your data

For users creating a database, it’s now faster and easier to access your database.

When you create a new database using dev.new, we now route you directly to the Data tab where we’ve added a new Connect button to make it easier to view your data.

The Connect modal offers a few options for connecting to your database as well as an Open option in the case of Postgres.

Nice!

Want more improvements like this?

Let us know what else we can do to make working with databases easier.

Update Your Templates

We released the new Template Composer to GA a couple weeks ago and we’re so happy to see a great response from the community.

But what if you made a template a while back using now-deprecated plugins?

Well you’re in luck!

This week we shipped an easy upgrade path to update templates using legacy plugins to the new database services paradigm.

All you have to do is log in to Railway and edit a template that uses plugins and you should see a handy new modal. (Hint: You can find your templates here.)

If you have any trouble be sure to drop your issue in the Help Station thread.

Fixes and Improvements

• We wrote a blogpost about how we “do sales” at Railway. Check it out, it’s called “Scale Not Sales”
• We improved the random project name generator to reduce the number of, well shall we say, unfortunate project names
• We added the option to unsubscribe from sub-processor email updates
• We fixed an issue with opening a staged volume or service
• We improved consistency when deleting projects