news.ycombinator.com
I'm kinda shocked (yet not surprised) at how bad railway ...
Excerpt
- Why were they making CDN changes in prod? With their 100M funding recently they could afford a separate env to test CDN changes. Did their engineering team even properly understand surrogate keys to feel confident to roll out a change in prod? I don't think they're beating the AI allegations to figure out CDN configs, a human would not be this confident to test surrogate keys in prod. ... - They didn't immediately notify customers about the security incident (people learned from their users). The apparently have emailed affected customers only, many hours after. Some people that were affected that still haven't been emailed, and they seem to be radio silent lately. - Their founder on twitter keeps using their growth as an excuse for their shoddy engineering, especially lately. Their uptime for what's supposed to be a serious production platform is abysmal, they've clearly prioritised pushing features over reliability https://status.railway.com/ and the issues I've outlined here have little to do with growth, and more to do with company culture. … ... > Their forum is also getting heated, customers have lost revenue, had medical data leaked etc., with no proper followup from the railway team … ... You can't just keep saying you're open to feedback and being transparent as vanity. There's plenty of feedback on here, your twitter, your forum, and feedback is people are telling you to focus on reliability, because railway keeps breaking their deployments. If you don't care about reliability and prefer to scale with features, be honest about it. Railway's poor uptime does not lie. … By way that's only one forum post, there are many that are just ignored, one where a user mentioned they're reporting railway to ICO for a GDPR breach, rightfully. We do indeed have a staging environment as mentioned previously. The issue arose in the rollout to production as mentioned previously.
Related Pain Points
Production Deployment Without Proper Testing Pipeline
9Changes are deployed directly to production without apparent dev/test/staging environments, causing widespread bugs to affect all users simultaneously. The lack of canary deployments and feature flags prevents quick rollback of breaking changes.
Delayed and incomplete security incident notification
9Security incidents involving data leaks were not immediately communicated to affected customers. Many hours passed before notifications were sent, and some affected users were never notified, with the company becoming unresponsive to escalations.
Platform outages during critical deployments
8Vercel experiences regional outages that cause 500 errors on production sites. For a premium service marketing to businesses, these reliability issues are concerning, particularly when they coincide with client campaigns or product launches.
Unresponsive to customer feedback about critical issues
8Despite claiming to be open to feedback and transparent, Railway ignores numerous reports of critical problems across forums, Twitter, and support channels. Customers have reported GDPR breaches, medical data leaks, and lost revenue with minimal follow-up from the team.