Railway Metal

Railway Metal is the next generation of Railway's underlying infrastructure. It is built on hardware that we own and operate in datacenters around the world.

Learn more about how we built it in our blog post So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center.

Why?

We are making this move as part of our commitment to providing best-in-class infrastructure for our users. This change enables us to improve our platform's performance, unlock additional features, increase reliability, and make Railway more cost-effective for all users.

With Railway Metal, you can expect the following benefits:

• Regions for Trial & Hobby plan users: Railway Metal will be available to all users, including Trial & Hobby Plan users. Trial & Hobby plan users will be able to deploy services on all four Railway Metal regions in the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

• Cheaper Pricing: Running our own hardware lets us reduce prices. Once Railway Metal is Generally Available, all users can expect to pay up to 50% less for Network Egress, and up to 40% less for Disk Usage.

• Improved Performance: Services on Railway will run faster. Our new CPUs are more powerful with higher core count and better performance per-core. Volume read/write performance will also be significantly faster as all of our disks are NVMe SSDs, which are faster than the disks we could offer before.

• Enhanced Reliability: With Railway Metal, we are able to manage the hardware, software, and networking stack end-to-end. This allows us to move faster and fix problems more quickly. (For instance, before Railway Metal, incidents such as a single host failure would often take us ~60 minutes to bring the host back up. With our own hardware, we can bring the host back up significantly faster.)

• Improved Networking: We connect directly to major internet providers and other cloud platforms worldwide, giving you faster connections in and out of Railway.

• Higher Available Resources: Railway Metal has greater capacity that we will be increasing over time, allowing us to offer you more computing resources on-demand.

• Unlocks More Features: With our own hardware and networking stack, we can power more advanced features that were not possible before, such as Static Inbound IPs, Anycast Edge Network, High-Availability Volumes, etc.

Regions & Availability

Railway Metal is available to all users, including Trial & Hobby Plan users.

Each Railway Metal region is located in a datacenter that was chosen strategically to provide the best possible performance and reliability.

We are in the process of expanding our Railway Metal regions, and we expect to have all regions available by the end of Q1'2025 (by 31 March 2025).

Railway Metal Region	Status
US West (California)	🟢 Active
US East (Virginia)	🟢 Active
Europe West (Amsterdam)	🟠 End of Q1'2025 (31 March 2025)
Southeast Asia (Singapore)	🟠 End of Q1'2025 (31 March 2025)

Gradual Upgrade

We will gradually move services without a volume to Railway Metal as we increase the pool of our hardware and its capabilities.

When this happens, you may see a new deploy initiated by Railway in your service:

Because this is a new deploy of your latest Active deployment, the behaviour will be the same as if you've manually issued a new deploy. As such, you may notice that:

• There may be a brief downtime during the upgrade. To prevent this, ensure you have Health Checks set up for your service

• All ephemeral storage (such as /tmp, etc.) will be wiped. To prevent this, use Volume to store data persistently. All storage is considered ephemeral unless they're on a Railway Volume

Note that the above generally applies to deploying a new version of your service. The upgrade to Railway Metal is irrelevant to the behaviour you may run into above - they are the same as if you were to manually deploy a new version of your service.

For services in US West (Oregon), Railway will not move your service to Railway Metal if your service references another service with a volume. This is to prevent any cross-regional networking latency spikes for your service. Refer to this FAQ for more information.

Rollback

If you encounter any issues with your service after the upgrade, you can rollback to the previous version by clicking Rollback button in the banner above.

Manual rollback

To rollback manually, modify your service's Settings -> Deploy -> Regions and select regions without the Metal (New) tag.

Known Limitations

• Railway Metal is currently unavailable for services with a volume
• For Pro users, Static IPs is currently unavailable on Railway Metal regions

Timeline

Our transition to Railway Metal will happen in phases. Here's what you can expect:

Date	What's Happening	Status
Starting December 26th, 2024	All new deploys on newly-created services without a volume by Trial & Hobby users will use Railway Metal by default.	🟢
Starting January 1st, 2025	We will be gradually upgrading services without a volume to Railway Metal. You can learn more about the gradual upgrade here.	🟠
Starting January 31st, 2025	All new deploys on all services without a volume by Trial & Hobby users will use Railway Metal by default.	🔘
Starting February 14th, 2025	All new deploys on all services without a volume by Pro & Enterprise users will use Railway Metal by default.	🔘
Starting March 14th, 2025	All new deploys on services with a volume by Trial & Hobby users will use Railway Metal by default.	🔘
Starting March 28th, 2025	All new deploys on services with a volume by Pro & Enterprise users will use Railway Metal by default.	🔘
In Q2'2025 (after March 31st, 2025)	We will begin migrating services with a volume to Railway Metal. We will share more details about this as we get closer to the date.	🔘

FAQ

Is this a free upgrade?

Yes.

How do I receive the upgrade sooner?

Go to your service's Settings -> Deploy -> Regions, and select any region with the Metal (New) tag.

Refer to Regions & Availability to see the regions available for Railway Metal.

How do I know if I'm on Railway Metal?

To check if your service is running on Railway Metal, go to your service's Settings -> Deploy -> Regions. If you are on Railway Metal, you will see a Metal (New) tag next to the region.

Is Railway Metal stable?

Yes. We have been running a growing amount of deployments on it for the past several months. As of the time of this writing, there are ~40,000 deployments on Railway Metal, and we have not seen any significant issues.

Is there downtime if I upgrade?

Upgrading to Railway Metal re-deploys your service. This may cause a brief period of downtime as your new deploy is being set up. You can set up Health Checks to prevent this.

What is the difference between Railway Metal and regions?

Railway Metal refers to our own hardware and infrastructure. Regions refer to the physical location of the datacenter where the hardware is located.

I'm experiencing slow network performance after switching to US West (California) Railway Metal region. What should I do?

You may experience increased latency if your application is communicating with other services (such as databases) in US West (Oregon). This is caused by the physical distance between Oregon (our current region) and California (Railway Metal region).

We recommend switching back to the US West (Oregon) region if you are experiencing increased latency after upgrading to US West (California). See Manual rollback for instructions.

How do I opt-out?

There is no way to opt-out of Railway Metal. Please reach out to us if you have any concerns.

Getting Help

Please reach out to us on our Help Station if you run into any issues. You can also reach out to us over Slack if you are a Pro or Business Class / Enterprise customer.