Every so often here on Planet Earth, we are lucky enough to observe one of nature’s most spectacular events — a great migration.

No but seriously folks … you don’t have to be Sir David Attenborough to see that migrating 

Railway Metal has been out in the wild since September 2024. We’ve thrown Trial users at it. We’ve thrown Hobby users at it. And since GA — companies are running comfortably with service that will ultimately be better, faster, cheaper, more configurable, and more reliable than our legacy “

” stack. (Click the link to read about why we’re doing this migration.)

In fact, 100% of new services are already deploying to Railway Metal and we’re approaching 50% of all Railway workloads on Metal. 

 in the making and we’re going to start flipping the tracks to migrate the remaining workloads over.

For astute email inbox checkers, you will have seen 2 emails + Changelogs from the Railway team nudging you to move your remaining services over to Railway Metal. 

Those nudges will now be stern reminders.

According to our timetable published 8 weeks ago, Trial and Hobby have been continually auto-migrated to Metal.

We have assigned dates to each host upon which we will remove ALL workloads. This allows us to proactively communicate when we expect impact to services. Ideally, you will migrate to Railway Metal before that date sent to you. 

During this month you will receive additional communications:

An ask that you move your services to a Railway Metal region, with a booking link with the Railway team for a handheld migration

An email indicating that your plan’s services will be moved when we begin moving them

You may receive multiple if your services are in different hosts or regions. This is why we ask that you plan your migration ASAP

An email including a date when your services will begin to be moved

An email when your services are getting migrated underway

If you’d like the Railway team to assist you on that migration — please 

We’d like to note that the entire Railway Support and Solutions Team’s only priority this month is to assist our customers migrating to Metal. We have a team with complete TZ coverage and can work with you when your traffic is on off-peak hours. 

You should expect prompt communication for all migration matters. We don’t take the responsibility to your business lightly and as such we are all hands in the train engine room making sure that your migration is as smooth as possible.

Next, let’s talk about how we’re making moving DBs easier.

Volumes migrate to the region of their associated service

Stateless migration is one thing, but you might be wondering, 

Volumes follow their associated service regions, so you’ll need to visit the service that owns your volume and select the new region. 

It’s as simple as that, but if you run into any issues, please 

 that we’ll soon be deleting Trial plan projects 

. That means that your Trial plan will automatically end at 30 days even if you have unused credit. 

, but please bear in mind that this is paving the way for a new free plan that is coming quickly down the rails to new Railway users later this quarter. 

With this change, we can create a generous free plan with resources that were otherwise being devoted to providing endless provisional resources below production-grade in service level. 

Do you know what Builder V2 is? It’s not a story that old changelogs will tell you. 

Namely because the original desire to work on this got solved by a well known feature called: 

What ended up happening was a branching between old and new systems and it was a pain to debug. We removed this option a year ago. For those still on it, we have migrated you today. 

This one is one we hoped that we didn’t have to deprecate but it’s a feature that didn’t honor the platform so it has to go.

Around 3 months ago, we shipped Copy Volumes on PR so people would have to run seed scripts when testing out PR environments. Because we are mid-migration moving to a new storage system, it would cause all sorts of problems and edge cases. 

We realized that adding Beta even on a bad experience was unacceptable. So we are un-publishing the feature and waiting until after the migration to revisit the flow. 

We stand by the flow, but not the implementation. More from us here later.

We repaired an intermittent dashboard issue. You may have noticed increased 404s, and outages, but we should be out of the woods. Our service mesh would 

 how to route people to the dashboard when we would deploy code. Attempts to fix it made it worse before it got better. You can read more about it 

 command that allows you to update the amount of regions and replicas running on a service

We instituted some rate-limits because SOME OF YOU (not naming names) thought it would be funny to create 100s of workspaces 

We changed the maximum length of service names to be up to 48 characters from the previous 32

We updated the international flag icon set in the settings

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1746219992/2025-05-02_jjjpev.png

The Great Metal Migration, Stateful Migrations Now Available, Trial Plan Deletion Reminder, Builder V2 Deprecation, Copy Volumes on PR Deprecation

Changelog #0236