Alt cloud platform Railway forced to pause lowest tiers after onrush of GCP customers

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 …

[Michael Hoffmann]

This is interesting all on its own: rather than saying "oh well, we'll just go to one of the other 2 hyperscalers" they would rather go to a sub-provider, at the risk of swarming them.

That's almost like saying "I'd rather cut my todger off than use Azure".

I sympathise...

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes the assumption that Railways experience is unique.

GCP accounts for around 10% of the PaaS market - Azure and AWS account for around 56% with the remaining 34% being the "other" that Railways lives in.

[Claptrap314]

Imagine you are the first level manager in charge of these things. You've been fending off the multi-cloud nonsense ever since Gartner first mentioned it around 2017. Google has this outage. You've documented this business risk, along with the costs of mitigation (to include being multi-cloud) all this time, but now you've got an SVP breathing down the neck of your director. How do you handle the situation?

Sure, you could spin up on AWS or Azure, but if you do, you're going to have to re-litigate multi-cloud in order to shut down this emergency deploy--you will probably lose, which is going to cost the company a LOT, and cause you a WHOLE LOT of aggrivation. If you go with a provider that no one has heard of, however, shutting it down will be almost zero friction. If you are challenged on it, you can give back some nonsense about avoiding first-tier price gouging in this situation, which is why we had this solution prepared for immediate rollout.

[AntonOfTheWoods]

Credit where it's due

I have been an MS hater for literally decades but have hated basically every cloud provider experience I've ever had, including in professional contexts... Except for Azure. I had several problems of my own making and their support was just awesome. The interface is very clumsy and cluttered but probably gets better when you use it every day (like heaps of metro train systems... Bad for tourists, great for locals). They're no more expensive than the other big players and offer everything most customers need. And great support. I would definitely look at the first if I ever need a tier 1 supplier. And I paid for an @linux.com address.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Credit where it's due

Their reliability is well bellow the other two, and they are the only cloud provider who's crash dump included the contents of a VM that wasn't ours, which is very worrying.