---
title: "Railway Metal Beta, New Crons GA, New Data UI"
date: 2024-09-20
number: 0204
url: https://railway.com/changelog/2024-09-20-railway-metal-beta
---

# Railway Metal Beta, New Crons GA, New Data UI

Attention Passengers: Railway Metal is here!

That’s right — we’re talking physical Railway servers in a physical Railway data center hosting your virtual Railway workloads. 

We’ve spoken about it a few times in this space, but we couldn’t be more excited about this. It’s the start of an important new phase of growth for our company and ultimately will result in a level of service far beyond what we’re able to offer today — faster machines, regions for Hobby users, faster global expansion, and more.

Want to hear more about what we’ve unlocked this week? 

Let’s get into the changelog!

## Railway Metal Arrives in Beta

[Video: Railway Metal is now available as a region for all users in service-level settings]

[Two weeks ago](https://railway.app/changelog/2024-09-06-edge-improvements#railway-metal-update), we teased you with a picture of some of our first Railway servers lighting up our first new data center.

This week, we’re thrilled to announce that **Railway Metal** is now available in Beta for the all-new `us-west2` [service region](https://docs.railway.app/reference/regions#region-options).

How about a mini-Q&A to mark the occasion? Let’s do it. 

*Q. Does Railway Metal mean Railway now operates physical servers?*

A. It sure does! We’ve been hard at work racking and stacking physical hardware across four different regions and this is the first user-facing result of that effort.

*Q. Why are you doing this? *

A. In short? So we can deliver better, faster, cheaper, more configurable, and more reliable service to our users. In long? You’ll have to wait for our blogpost on the topic. 😎

*Q. Should I switch my services over to metal right now? *

A. Railway Metal is currently in Beta, which means that although we’d love for you to start moving workloads over, we are obliged to let you know that we cannot yet guarantee the same level of service as our other regions. Please keep that in mind. 

*Q. Is this available to me on the Hobby plan?*

A. It sure is! We’ll also soon be rolling out US-East and EU-West regions for Metal that will be available to Hobby plan users as well.

*Q. How do I get started?*

A. You should now see `US West (California, USA) - Metal Beta` as an option in your service-level `Region` settings.

Meanwhile, we’d love your feedback. 

Please [drop us a line](https://help.railway.app/feedback/introducing-railway-metal-beta-920458ce) and let us know if you run into any issues on Railway Metal, no matter how small.

## New Crons

[Video: Crons are now more reliable, more configurable, more verbose, and more user friendly]

[Last week](https://railway.app/changelog/2024-09-13-sealed-variables#revamped-cron-jobs-beta) we told you about the all-new Crons experience in Beta. 

This week, we’re removing that beta label and GA-ing this bad boy. 

That’s right — the faster, more reliable, and more verbose new cron experience is now generally available.

[Let us know](https://help.railway.app/feedback/new-cron-experience-a74e2afa) what you think by leaving some feedback in the feature thread.

## New Data UI

[Image: The data tab in Redis and Mongo services has been updated for clarity and organization]

We’ve cleaned up and unified the `Data` tab across the four most popular database types deployed on Railway — PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB. 

In particular, you should notice a new streamlined UI when you flip over to the `Data` tab in a Redis or Mongo instance.

We hope you like it — and with that, we also hope you have a wonderful weekend. 🌈

## Fixes and Improvements

- We added the concept of a *preferred region* for Pro users and higher. Now, once a preferred region is set, all future resources are by default deployed to that region 💫
- We added the ability to edit a GitHub repo source without having to make the painful effort to remove it and reconnect it