On Monday, Railway, a provider of cloud infrastructure services, decided to throttle software builds by customers in its lowest paying tiers to accommodate unexpected demand for service following the Google Cloud Platform outage last week.
Angelo Saraceno, solutions engineer for Railway, explained the situation to The Register following a complaint from a customer who expressed concern about service interruption.
"Railway has seen significant workload growth, particularly from users migrating off GCP [Google Cloud Platform] and Heroku," said Saraceno via email. "As a result, when platform resources get strained, we degrade service in tiers: first builds, then signups, starting with the lower tiers."
Saraceno said that in this instance, Railway temporarily throttled and then paused deployments for Trial and Hobby customers in order to maintain service quality for Pro customers. Enterprise customers, we're told, were unaffected because they run on dedicated infrastructure.
We're told that the only paying customers who were affected by the throttling were Hobby tier users, who pay $5 per month plus usage.
"For these users, we operate on a best-effort basis, as defined in our Terms of Service with the group of users affected, relying on the ToS alone isnt enough," said Saraceno. "Based on community feedback, were exploring ways to better surface these expectations directly in the product."
The situation has since been resolved per the company's status page.
The GCP migration Saraceno was talking about appears to be more of an attempt to implement a failover in the wake of its June 12 outage, rather than a permanent provider change.
"I don't wanna give the impression that people are just moving immediately onto Railway in one day due to an incident," he said, in reference to the GCP failure last week. "But, when incidents happen (even on Railway), usually a customer will quickly stand up a failover environment either to test or maintain business continuity."
Railway itself did make the move from GCP to running its own infrastructure, as the company noted in a blog post earlier this year. The shift to Railway-run datacenters was completed at the end of May, we're told, though according to Saraceno, the company still maintains a few GCP instances.
In any event, the shift to in-house infrastructure wasn't enough to shield the firm from the GCP outage, which also triggered throttling last week in response to service degradation.
We asked if the demand for Railway's services is coming from higher tier or lower tier customers, and Saraceno said, "Unfortunately both, we have four colocation presences that make up our four regions, two in the US, one in Amsterdam, and one in Singapore.
"The incident in question wasn't an issue with lack of capacity in those co-los, rather, getting builds landed on those machines. People started their workday around EST time, and then we had a build queue that couldn't handle the capacity."
Trial customers, who use the one-week free trial, will get credited $5 worth of usage. Saraceno said that when the free trial expires, Railway grants a recurring $1/month usage credit to keep lightweight services up and running, subject to the availability of space compute resources.
"Its not something we market heavily, but it helps maintain continuity for casual developers and learners," he explained. "We have no plans to remove the Trial or Free tiers."
That said, the discontinuation of free services is a common milestone for tech companies, as demonstrated by Heroku, Google, Twitter, and Dyn, among others. �
