Cloud Infrastructure on Easy Mode with Jake Cooper from Railway.App [DevOps Deployed Ep 07]
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Jake Cooper, founder and CEO of Railway, discusses how Railway simplifies cloud infrastructure by abstracting away the complexity of AWS/GCP-style platforms. Railway positions itself as a lifecycle management engine rather than just a PaaS, helping teams develop, deploy, and diagnose applications with minimal friction. Jake explains Railway's technical architecture: a TypeScript/React frontend, GraphQL API, gRPC Go microservices, and a custom container orchestrator built on Temporal running on GCP VMs. He covers the decision to build a custom orchestrator instead of using Kubernetes — primarily to handle stateful workloads like databases more elastically. The conversation also covers Railway's async-first team culture with 7 people supporting 40,000 users, their Discord-centric operations, feature flagging via Discord roles, and their long-term vision of enabling open source maintainers to monetize their work through the platform.