Hi Railway Team and Community,

I want to highlight a significant challenge for European developers (or anyone targeting the EU market) when using Railway: the current lack of deployment regions that align with major managed database providers makes it infeasible to build production-grade systems on Railway in Europe.

The Problem:

At present, Railway offers the following EU deployment options:

• EU West (Amsterdam) – europe-west4

• EU West Metal (Amsterdam) – europe-west4-drams3a

However, none of the major managed database providers offer Amsterdam as a region. This mismatch between Railway’s deployment regions and the regions offered by popular database services leads to:

• Increased latency – Application and database communications are routed across distant regions.

• Compliance concerns – Sensitive data traverses regions unnecessarily, making GDPR and other data residency rules harder to manage.

• Operational headaches – It forces developers to either compromise on performance, maintenance or give up on Railway altogether.

The Ecosystem – Where Databases Are:

Here’s where the major database providers actually operate in the EU:

• Neon:

  • Frankfurt (eu-central-1)

  • London (eu-west-2)

• Supabase:

  • Dublin (eu-west-1)

  • London (eu-west-2)

  • Paris (eu-west-3)

  • Frankfurt (eu-central-1)

  • Zurich (eu-central-2)

  • Stockholm (eu-north-1)

• PlanetScale:

  • Dublin (eu-west-1)

  • Frankfurt (eu-central-1)

  • London (eu-west-2)

• Prisma Postgres:

  • Paris (eu-west-3), with plans to expand further

Notice the glaring absence of Amsterdam across these providers.

The Impact:

For any application hosted on Railway that needs to connect to one of these managed databases (which is a very common setup), there’s currently no viable solution to deploy both app and database in the same region within Europe. This makes Railway effectively unusable for serious European projects.

The Request:

To make Railway a realistic option for developers in Europe, please consider adding the following EU regions, which align with major database providers:

• Frankfurt (eu-central-1)

• Dublin (eu-west-1)

• London (eu-west-2)

• Paris (eu-west-3)

• Zurich (eu-central-2)

• Stockholm (eu-north-1)

These additions would immediately make Railway a contender for production workloads in the EU, ensuring that developers can colocate their applications and databases for low latency, regulatory compliance, and operational simplicity.

Right now, without these regions, Railway just isn’t a feasible choice for many of us in Europe.

Looking forward to the Railway team’s thoughts and the community’s feedback.

Best,

Michael