Comment by Jgrubb
13 hours ago
Railway has not had the best month in the tech press have they? And in both cases it was an automated process belonging to some other party that put them there, damaging their reputation.
I was going to talk to our google rep about their killing the Gemini cli but this is way more concerning.
Building on someone else's platform is always gonna be a risky move, and building a platform on top of someone else's platform is even riskier.
My company used to use a hosting provider that was basically AWS plus some extra guarantees. We just finished migrating onto regular AWS because they now offer what we need directly.
But...AWS is a platform too, no? Seems like you're in the same category of risk you just moved to a more well-known name. Granted, Amazon is the most reliable even if they have their own quirks.
Each critical dependency you stack multiplies your risk. Now you have to worry about Railway AND Google causing business-damaging outages.
In the case of them giving AI admin credentials to delete their production database, and it deleted their production database: that's on them. They were the only ones who put the admin account credentials into their AI.
Then they took no personal responsibility. That definitely damaged their reputation. Here, they are taking at least some responsibility. Props to them on improving.
Also, GCP does indeed have serious reliability issues, and Google does indeed have serious customer support issues.
EDIT: It has been brought to my attention below that the first 2 paragraphs are misattributed, and were not Railway, but rather a customer of theirs. Sorry, Railway!
Did Railway give admin credentials to delete their production database? My memory of the incident is that a customer of Railways used an AI tool to delete their production database, and then blamed Railway for it. The customer was the one who put their own account credentials into their own AI, not Railway
You are totally right, my mistake.