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In this week’s changelog, we’re going to be talking all about a pair of infrastructure-side improvements that we’re really excited about. 

We’ve got an all-new edge proxy in beta, we’ve got static IPs in alpha, and (on a completely different note) we’ve also revamped our merch shop! 

There’s a lot to get into so get comfortable — we’ll wait a sec for you to refill your cup. 

Try out the new edge proxy by selecting the toggle in the service settings

Let’s talk about Railway’s edge or network proxies. 

These are the proxies that route all external traffic to your 

Before we get into the big news (v3 of our Edge Proxy is now available in beta), let’s cover a little bit of history.

, we announced that we were transitioning our edge proxy from 

. This was Edge Proxy v2 and the benefit at the time was enormous. Since Envoy provided us with real-time configuration mechanisms, it allowed us to change where requests should go seamlessly whenever you made a deploy. 

 traffic down from 10 seconds to near-instant.

But over the past year, as our deployed application base has been growing massively, this mechanism slowly began to creak and cause deployment times to take upwards of 45 seconds for traffic cutover

 That’s unacceptable but there’s a reason for it. 

Envoy prioritizes some things more than others ... fast update times for example is not as much of a priority for a company like Lyft (creators of Envoy) but is a huge priority for our multi-tenant environment where we have large configs for hundreds of thousands of internet properties. 

Because of Envoy’s threading model, rolling out diffs to every proxy requires creating a lot copies of the state to avoid having locks … and this all started to come at the cost of update time.

he scale we had at the time, we’ve outgrown it massively since then. Hence we set out late last year to start building an entirely new service discovery protocol that would provide instant deploys regardless of how many services we’re handling traffic for. 

This is how we arrived at the the new Edge Proxy we’re releasing today in Beta.

It’s an entirely home-rolled piece of custom software and we’re really excited

Let’s talk about what it unlocks for you today if you choose to try out the new proxy:

You’ll experience near instant deploy cutovers instead of waiting for a minute until it’s provisioned as currently happens today

You’ll get new detailed error pages with a traceable Request ID that you can forward to us when debugging an issue

And now let’s talk about what else the new proxy will soon unlock:

We’ll be able to further improve service start time

We’ll be able to provide automatic port detection

We’ll be able to provide network logs and metrics

 support for advanced routing rules and load balancing strategies

We’ll be able to improve service quality and 

As mentioned, the new Edge Proxy is in Beta, but we’d love you to try it now. 

If you’d like to get started upgrading to the new proxy, you’ll need to first visit your service settings page and activate the 

. You can confirm you're using the new proxy when you see 

Later on we’ll be rolling out the new proxy 

imeline in place to keep you informed on that progress. No action will be required on your end at any point.

We’ve written in more detail about the new Edge Proxy in a 

Please head over there to read more and to 

You can now assign a static IP to a service through the service settings panel (Pro users only)

By default, Railway egress IPs are dynamic since our orchestrator may schedule workloads on different machines depending on availability when a service is redeployed. 

This is a problem for users who need a pre-defined set of IP addresses for their services — think something like 

 as an example, which requires customers to add IPs to an allowlist before connecting.

Today we’re introducing an alpha version of Static IPs. We’re excited about this release because Static IPs have been 

 for a long time and because this will unblock a large number of users from allowlisting their IPs. 

Before we show you how to enable Static IPs, a couple things to note:

Static IPs are only available to Pro plan and above users

To get started, you’ll simply need to activate the 

If you have comments please drop us a line in a 

Get yourself some new Railway swag today!

 we’ve added a number of all-new Railway-branded items to the shop — we’re talking bags, socks, magnets, you name it. (

We upgraded the dashboard to load incremental project data so it appears much faster

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1715994674/2024-0517_bsscg0.png

New Edge Proxy, Static IPs, New Railway Merch Shop

Changelog #0186