Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Railway Launches Railpack: 77% Faster Builds, Goodbye Nixpacks

2025-06-07

Railway has released Railpack, a new build system replacing Nixpacks. Railpack addresses Nixpacks' limitations in version management, build size, and caching. It offers granular version control, significantly smaller image sizes (38% reduction for Node.js, 77% for Python), and improved caching, leading to much faster builds. Using BuildKit and Mise, Railpack employs a three-stage build process (analyze, plan, generate) for finer control and parallelization. Currently supporting Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, and static HTML deployments, Railpack plans to add more languages and frameworks.

(blog.railway.com)

Development

Building a Cloud from Scratch: Automation at Scale

2025-03-24

This blog post details Railway's journey in building their own cloud infrastructure from the ground up. Their first hurdle was mapping physical hardware to OS-visible device names. They leveraged the Redfish API to gather hardware information and automated configuration using MetalCP and Temporal workflows. For OS installation, they cleverly combined Pixiecore, the Debian Installer, and Claude AI for one-click deployment. Finally, they built a highly reliable L3 network using BGP unnumbered and FRR, achieving scalability and automated management.

(blog.railway.com)

Tech

Slack Overflow: How Railway Scaled Slack Support for Thousands of Developers

2025-01-28

Railway, a software infrastructure provider, dramatically improved customer support by leveraging Slack. Initially, manual Slack channel creation proved unsustainable. They built 'Help Station,' an internal support tool, and integrated it with Slack, automating channel creation, message syncing, and issue categorization (sales or support). This involved overcoming technical hurdles like switching between Slack Bolt SDK's Socket and HTTP modes and implementing a message queue (Temporal). The result? A 50x increase in customer engagement and an 8x improvement in response times, significantly boosting customer satisfaction and revenue.

(blog.railway.com)

Development Slack Integration Customer Support Scaling

Railway's Journey: Building a Data Center from Scratch

2025-01-17

Constrained by hyperscaler limitations, Railway embarked on Project Metal, building its own data center in just nine months. The blog post details the entire process, from site selection, power and network infrastructure, to server installation, highlighting challenges and solutions encountered along the way. This included power and network redundancy, rack layout, cable management, and more. The result? A software-defined network and internal tools automating the entire data center build process, from design to deployment.

(blog.railway.com)

Tech

Railway: Automating Revenue, Not Sales

2024-12-18

Railway shares its journey of shifting from traditional sales to automated revenue growth. Initial attempts at traditional sales proved ineffective. They pivoted to a product-led growth (PLG) model and developed a regression model to predict customer upgrades or churn. This model uses factors like successful/failed builds, configured regions, support requests, and feature adoption to score customers, identifying those needing assistance. Proactive support and this targeted approach boosted revenue and customer satisfaction, leading to sustainable business growth.

(blog.railway.com)

Startup automated revenue product-led growth regression model