Appreciate the feedback. We got some feedback previously that things were "too technical" and not acknowledging it from the what users saw.
I've gone ahead and re-added the surrogate keys statement to the press release. Thank you for the feedback and if there's other things that you believe can be better please let me know!
> Honestly for a production-grade _platform_ company, that also does compliance (SOC2/3, HIPAA etc.), not having a staged release is negligent, and how you guys are handling this is a huge red flag. I've done such changes myself in production envs, for deployments that don't have the stakes you guys have. I'm normally more sympathetic on incidents, but the lack of transparency thus far from railway leaves me doubting more than anything.
We do indeed have a staging environment as mentioned previously. The issue arose in the rollout to production as mentioned previously.
> The blog post reads like PR compared to the initial incident status report, and the resolved timestamp does not match which is sloppy.
I've gone ahead and added the surrogate key mention into the post mortem. We initially got in trouble for having it be too technical centric and not enough on the user impact. It's a delicate balance; apologies. As I mention, we are open to critical feedback here.
> Emailing only affected users isn't working out, because affected people aren't yet emailed (I know one personally). Just check the post on your own forum (https://station.railway.com/questions/data-getting-cached-or... did you actually read it?) and see the list of people affected still not emailed, and left on read.
We have people working directly in that thread. For anybody who believes they were affected but not reached out to, we're working directly with them. We do take this very seriously. If you know someone here, please have them reach out either there or directly to me at [email protected]
> Again, it's not an excuse if you're a _platform_ company that customers pay a lot of money to be reliable. You can't just keep saying you're open to feedback and being transparent as vanity.
In the directly linked tweet I've mentioned that we're focusing on scaling the current system vs adding new features. We absolutely do need to do better on reliability, and my point is "Is there a specific poor engineering practice you're seeing here, or is it just based on reliability". Either is a fine crit we just want to make sure all our basis are covered
> Did you read the thread? Yes, only _one_ employee commented 5 hours after my HN comment. Still almost everyone left of read, unanswered questions etc.
Indeed I've read the thread, and we have people working it (you can see as of 8 hours ago).
> 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.
We went deep on them, tested them prior, and then when rubber met road in production we ran into cases we didn't see in testing. The large issue, and mentioned in the blogpost, is that we didn't have a mechanism to to a staged release.
> During and post-incident, the comms has been terrible. Initial blog post buried the lede (and didn't even have Incident Report in the title). They only updated this after negative feedback from their customers. I still get the impression they're trying to minimise this, it's pretty dodgy. As other comments mentioned, the post is vague.
Our initial post definitely could have been more clear, and we revised it the moment we got customer feedback to do so.
> 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.
We notified customers even before we did a wide release, as is process for anything security related. You create space for as much disclosure area as possible, and then follow up with a public disclosure
> 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.
Do you have any specifics here? We're scaling the system at 100x YoY growth right now, working 24/7 to scale the entire thing. Again, all ears on if you have specific crits as we're always open to receiving feedback on how we can do things better!
> Their forum is also getting heated, customers have lost revenue, had medical data leaked etc., with no proper followup from the railway team
There are team members in that thread linked, are you certain you linked the right thread? Happy to have a look at anything you believe we're missing!
Totally! People who see the impact will likely see more impacted than say, 3% of their services. Not all disruption created equal.
We rolled out a change to update our fraud model, and that uses workload fingerprinting
Since, in all likelyhood, your projects are similarly structured, there will be more impacted workloads if the shape of your workloads was in the "false positive" set
Will have more information soon but very valid (and astute) feelings!
> And my hosting provider is saying, "you are not allowed to push out your urgent fix, because we see that your app contains a far less urgent problem." There is no button that says "I understand, proceed anyway." Railway knows best.
We rolled this out quickly because of the React/NextJS CVE. I think this is actually a really good suggestion and we can look into it! Thank you for the thoughtful blogpost, and I'm sorry we let you down. We will work hard to re-earn your trust.
Bingo. Nix doesn't give you a generalizable-across-languages-and-ecosystems way of specifying specific versions without blowing up your package size, unless you hand Nix to your users (which we didn't want to do)
Maybe we were holding it wrong, but, we ultimately made the call to move away for that reason (and more)
Hey y'all! 3 years ago we built Nixpacks. However, we ran into some pretty large pains using Nix for dependency resolution
So today we're rolling out Railpack, the successor. It results in:
- Up to 75% smaller images
- Up to 5x faster builds
- Higher cache hit ratio
The goal is to provide a seamless alternative for the Dockerfile frontend. Railpack will automatically find your dependencies, you can add any additional ones, and it'll auto construct the build pipelines for you
This is the "next step". We're using our baremetal presence to now undercut the "big guys", which means 50% cheaper storage and networking for our users
This is the first week of our launch week so, expect more stuff all this week
Happy to answer any questions. This all seems very obvious in retrospect, but I wanted to share for any other early stage companies in the hopes people can avoid some scaling pains!
We're blessed with some kickass investors. They gave us just the right level of scrutiny. We were super clear about why we wanted to do this, we did it, and then they invested more money shortly after the first workloads starting running on metal
If you're looking for great partners, who actually have the gal to back innovation, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Redpoint (Shoutout Erica and Jordan!)
I've gone ahead and re-added the surrogate keys statement to the press release. Thank you for the feedback and if there's other things that you believe can be better please let me know!