Deploy and Host zipkin on Railway

What is zipkin?
Zipkin is an open-source distributed tracing system that collects, visualizes, and analyzes timing data from microservices. It enables tracing across distributed systems, helping teams detect bottlenecks and improve performance with ease.

About Hosting zipkin

Hosting Zipkin means running its server component to receive and store trace data from your applications. With Railway, deploying Zipkin is streamlined: simply connect the Zipkin server (via Docker or prebuilt images), configure the environment for your desired storage backend, and connect your services. Railway manages infrastructure, scaling, and networking, giving you a low-ops path to distributed tracing so you can focus on observability instead of setup.

Common Use Cases

• Tracing request paths across multiple microservices for faster debugging
• Visualizing latency and performance bottlenecks in distributed applications
• Analyzing service dependencies and correlating errors with traces

Dependencies for zipkin Hosting

• Java runtime or Zipkin binary (depending on deployment mode)
• Storage backend (MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, or in-memory)

Deployment Dependencies

• Docker (recommended for quick deployment)
• Railway CLI (for streamlined deployment and management)

You can find more at the Zipkin GitHub repo.

Why Deploy zipkin on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it. By deploying zipkin on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.