The Railway team spent some around one of the good lakes over in The Great Lakes reading customer stories aloud to help us prioritize features on the platform.

After spending Q3 on reliability, our new focus for the shortened quarter is growth and polish, internally summarized as: "honor". A lot of the feedback that we've been getting is usually about how Railway will handle the big things quite well but then you run into an experience breaking bug and you are thrusted back into the frustration zone.

We want deployment and management of your workloads to be the best experience out there from login to triage.

Usual caveats, the Q4 timeline isn’t a hard deadline- rather it indicates that we are either researching, implementing, or delivering a project within this period.

Without further ado, the projects:

Planned Projects

• Native Database Backups

  • One of our most upvoted feedback threads, and we feel that we have a good approach that balances multiple DB providers without locking too close to "one-DB" experience. Admittedly, we waited until we could pick this up until we had more confidence in our workflow engine and we have crossed that point.

• Improved Region/Volume Migrations

  • If you are a company who happened to have 1 TB of data on your DB and you wanted to move it from US-East to Singapore- have fun waiting while you brew a batch of coffee, or five. We are tackling workload portability as part of a few orchestration improvements. We need to tackle this before we can do multi-mount volumes properly. (Sorry Supabase users, we'll see you next year.)

• Canvas Improvements

  • We read the nits thread and noticed there was a lot of confusion around making groups and performing routine actions on the product. That's going to be tackled in a exploratory project where we are going to time box some polish for the end user.

• Regions on Hobby

  • Yes, need we say more?

• Connect to Private Network via CLI

  • Look- we want SSH, you've convinced us. However, secure tunnels are hard to dig. The Infra team will be showing the Product team how to dig private tunnels by first starting in the CLI so it's easier to administrate your DB.

• Identity Improvements (Google SSO)

  • The Railway team isn't too happy with the login experience, namely, we would prefer that users sign-up with their company email for company things, and personal email for personal things. We also know that the 1:1 GH link is a bit contradictory to those aims. We will be revisiting the login flows to support multiple IdPs.

• Realtime Canvas

  • Many users reported timers being off when performing deployments or noticed slowness when retrieving data. The product team is going to be auditing how the front-end fetches data to score some performance wins esp. for larger projects.

• Team Member Viewer Role

  • Since the introduction of Deployment Approvals, large teams have come out of the woodwork to help us define what RBAC will look like while on the platform. In short- you want your teammates to see config but not change it, we will be offering a stripped down role for Team members.

• General Polish

The Support Engineering team now has more resources to also improve the UX of our forums product to truly unify all feature comms. Expect the posting experience to improve quite a bit as well.

Customer big or small, we want your experience on the platform to be nothing short of mint. Let us know if we are working on the right things or not- we are always all ears.

As always, all aboard!