Railway vs AWS: When Leaving Railway Means Owning Reliability

TL;DR

• I no longer recommend Railway as the default for serious production workloads after its recent pattern of platform-level incidents.

• Railway vs AWS is not a simple choice between easy and powerful. It is a question of who owns reliability when production breaks.

• AWS is the most complete reliability toolkit in this series, but only for teams ready to design and operate infrastructure themselves.

• AWS can reduce black-box platform dependency, but it adds architecture, security, cost, and on-call responsibility.

• If you are already running critical workloads on Railway, start evaluating exit paths now. AWS is one possible destination, not the automatic answer.

I used Railway because it made deployment feel almost effortless.

Connect a repository, set a few environment variables, add a database, and ship. For a long time, that simplicity was the main reason I recommended it to developers who wanted to move quickly without thinking about infrastructure.

Railway’s May 2026 outage changed that recommendation for me.

The question is no longer whether Railway is easier than AWS. It obviously is. The question is whether that ease is still worth the trust trade-off for serious production workloads.

In this series, Fly.io made me think about control. Vercel made me think about workload fit. AWS forced the harder question: am I ready to own the reliability decisions that Railway used to hide?

AWS gives teams a large set of services, regions, account structures, networking options, monitoring tools, and recovery patterns. That power can make production systems more resilient, but only when the team knows how to use it.

This article is not arguing that every Railway user should move to AWS. It is arguing that teams running meaningful production workloads on Railway should begin evaluating exit paths now, and AWS is one of the most serious options if they are ready to own reliability directly.

In this series I've explored where you go when the convenience of a PaaS stops being worth the risk. Railway vs Fly.io examined control through specific feature comparisons. Railway vs Vercel addressed workload fit. The next article in the series, Railway vs Render, looks at the more practical question for teams that still want a managed PaaS.

My Recommendation Right Now

Do not start new serious production deployments on Railway by default. If you already run critical workloads there, begin evaluating migration paths now.

I am not saying AWS is the right destination for every team. I am saying AWS is one of the most important options to evaluate if Railway’s recent incidents made you uncomfortable with black-box platform dependency.

Move to AWS only if your production risk, customer impact, compliance needs, or reliability requirements justify owning more infrastructure. AWS gives you more control, but it also makes your team responsible for turning that control into a reliable system.

Why Railway Feels So Much Easier Than AWS

Developers choose Railway because developers dislike configuring infrastructure. Writing code creates business value. Wrestling with subnet masks and routing tables usually doesn't.

Railway abstracts infrastructure entirely. That's its core value proposition. It gives you an environment where you connect your GitHub repository, define a few environment variables, and let the platform handle the rest. Teams deploy code without designing VPCs, IAM policies, load balancers, container orchestration, or database clusters.

While AWS offers developer-focused velocity products like AWS App Runner, Copilot, Amplify, and Lightsail, achieving the true reliability and isolation benefits discussed in this article requires teams to use its raw primitives. At that foundational level, AWS requires substantial architectural configuration before the first production-ready deployment can happen.

Railway defaults to immediate developer velocity. AWS defaults to secure, isolated primitives that must be assembled. That friction you feel when you first log into the AWS console is the feeling of an abstraction being stripped away, leaving you holding the raw wiring.

Railway's ease is real. The May 2026 outage changed whether that ease is enough.

What the May 2026 Railway outage changed

The May 19, 2026 incident was not just downtime. It was a trust-threshold event. It changed Railway from a platform I could recommend by default into a platform I would now evaluate with much more caution for serious production workloads.

On May 19, 2026, an upstream provider issue, a full suspension of its GCP account, severed connectivity to Railway's infrastructure. This was not a minor blip. It caused a widespread platform outage with severe production impact for affected teams.

For teams running production businesses on Railway, it was a severe service disruption. And it was not an isolated event. It was part of a troubling pattern: there have been at least five major platform incidents since November 2025.

These outages exposed the core vulnerability of the PaaS model. Users could not remediate the issue themselves. When your AWS EC2 instance dies, you can spin up another one, or rely on an Auto Scaling Group to do it for you. When a managed platform's underlying infrastructure drops off the internet, you're without recourse. "Wait for the platform to recover" became the only incident response plan.

The cascade raised questions about control plane dependency and blast radius. Teams running serious production workloads may want more control over account structure, failover, networking, backups, and observability.

AWS becomes relevant when "wait for the platform to recover" is no longer acceptable.

AWS is a reliability toolkit for teams willing to assemble the pieces

I looked at AWS because it addresses the Railway problem at the deepest level: account boundaries, network design, database recovery, observability, escalation paths, and blast-radius control all become decisions the team can make directly.

If you're reading this while staring at a Railway downtime notice, don't impulsively migrate to AWS thinking it will instantly solve your problems.

AWS works best as a reliability toolkit. It provides primitives: compute, databases, load balancers, DNS, queues, backups, IAM, monitoring, and account structures. It's entirely up to you to weave these primitives together into a coherent architecture.

AWS gives you more control over failure, but it also gives you more ways to create failure through bad architecture.

You can build an AWS environment that is less reliable than Railway if you don't know what you're doing. Put your entire application in a single Availability Zone without backups, misconfigure your security groups, and you'll create a fragile architecture. AWS does not guarantee reliability. Your team must engineer it.

Railway vs AWS: High-level architectural comparison

The comparison matters because AWS is not just another hosting vendor. It changes who owns reliability decisions.

Railway vs AWS: Failure Model, Platform Dependency, and Shared Responsibility

Railway asks you to trust the platform abstraction. AWS asks you to design the system. Neither removes risk. AWS gives mature teams more ways to contain risk, but only if they design for that outcome.

Railway's Platform Dependency

Railway abstracts failure from the customer completely, right up until the moment the platform itself has an incident. When that happens, you're blind.

During a platform-wide outage, the customer has limited ability to route around it. Railway's simplicity means fewer controls are exposed.

AWS Shared Responsibility

AWS operates on a Shared Responsibility model. This is a specific, contractually defined compliance framework in the AWS ecosystem. AWS is responsible for security of the cloud such as physical servers, hypervisors, and data centers. You're responsible for security in the cloud such as your data, network configurations, and application logic.

AWS services can have outages. Teams can design across availability zones, accounts, services, and sometimes regions. AWS customers must choose the right architecture. Bad AWS architecture can be less reliable than a simple PaaS.

While AWS offers regional isolation, rare global service outages like IAM or Route53 can still span regions. Engineers have the primitives to architect around them.

Database Reliability Comparison

Railway's default database plugins take automated daily snapshots, but they don't have point-in-time recovery or read replicas. There have been community reports of filesystem corruption and complete data loss. If your single database instance gets corrupted between snapshot windows, the lack of PITR leaves you exposed.

AWS RDS supports Multi-AZ failover, automated snapshots, automated backups, read replicas, and Point-in-Time Recovery when configured. For standard RDS Multi-AZ DB instances, AWS documentation says failover times are typically 60 to 120 seconds. AWS gives teams database recovery patterns that Railway does not expose by default.

Support Models and SLAs

The biggest difference between Railway and AWS isn't Docker containers. It's the contract you sign for incident response.

Railway relies heavily on platform-level and community support, depending on the plan. Even if you pay for a Pro plan, external analysis has reported a 72-hour support response window and limited application-level support.

AWS publishes support-plan response targets. AWS Business Support has historically listed a target response time of less than 1 hour for production system down cases, while newer AWS support tiers now include faster response targets for business-critical cases. Enterprise Support now starts at a lower $5,000 monthly minimum, reduced from the older $15,000 minimum, and advertises 15-minute response times for critical cases.

When you're running a revenue-generating SaaS, being able to escalate to AWS Support with a published response target changes your incident response posture.

Blast Radius, Why Account, Region, and Service Design Matter

Railway's outage made blast radius the key question. AWS matters because it lets teams separate accounts, regions, services, runtime paths, deploy paths, data stores, and recovery processes. That separation only exists if the team designs it.

In systems engineering, "blast radius" measures how much of your system goes down when a single component fails.

Railway's simplicity can mean a total blast radius during control-plane or upstream global routing failures. While regional data-plane failures can be mitigated via multi-region deployments, a global upstream routing provider failure can take down your database, frontend, backend, and cron jobs simultaneously.

AWS allows teams to design and restrict blast radius through:

• Multi-account separation, such as Production and Staging in entirely different AWS accounts

• Strict IAM boundaries

• Deployment across multiple Availability Zones

• Regional service choices

• Data replication

• DNS failover

• Backup and restore processes

• Queue-based decoupling

• Separating runtime dependencies from deploy and control plane dependencies

If the AWS console goes down, your currently running EC2 instances or Fargate tasks generally keep running. A broken dashboard won't take down your production APIs.

Operational Control, What AWS Gives You That Railway Hides

If you make the leap to AWS, you're trading convenience for control. Here's what that operational responsibility looks like.

AWS provides professional-grade tools:

• Infrastructure as Code, using Terraform or CloudFormation, for version-controlled and peer-reviewed infrastructure

• Fine-grained IAM to grant a specific Lambda function read-only access to exactly one S3 bucket

• VPC and network control

• Service-specific monitoring

• Logs and metrics

• Health events

• Backup policies

• Load balancing

• Queueing

• Autoscaling based on custom metrics

• Multi-region patterns

You also escape arbitrary PaaS limits. Railway lacks out-of-the-box native distributed queueing. Instead of relying on managed queues like AWS SQS and event routing via EventBridge for background processing, you have to build or bring your own on Railway.

The downside involves substantial operational burden:

• More setup time

• Higher ongoing maintenance

• More ways to misconfigure security

• More on-call responsibility

• More documentation and runbooks required

• More cost complexity

AWS gives you more buttons to press. That is useful only if you know which buttons matter.

Observability and Incident Transparency

After the Railway outage, incident transparency becomes part of platform selection. Teams need to know what broke, who was affected, what the provider changed, and what they can do differently next time.

Railway gives you basic, built-in logs sufficient to debug quick application errors. But during a provider outage, Railway functions as a black box. You don't know what's failing under the hood, and you can't see platform-level metrics.

AWS offers the AWS Health Dashboard, which shows public service health across services and regions. Signed-in users see account-specific events tailored directly to their running infrastructure. For major outages, AWS publishes detailed, highly technical Post-Event Summaries explaining exactly what broke and how they're fixing it.

Incident transparency doesn't prevent outages, but it helps teams understand provider-level events and build response processes.

However, there's a significant catch: the out-of-the-box visibility problem.

Transitioning to AWS means moving from automatic visibility into a platform you don't control, to a fully transparent platform where your application is opaque by default.

Out of the box, AWS tells you very little about your specific application logic. Developers must manually wire together distributed tracing using AWS X-Ray. You have to build custom dashboards in Grafana. You have to navigate tight CloudWatch API quotas, like being limited to 500 metrics per API request for GetMetricData, to achieve the baseline application monitoring you got for free on Railway.

Railway offers default simplicity with low transparency. AWS offers high platform transparency but demands heavy manual instrumentation before you can see what your code is actually doing.

That observability trade-off is also a workload-fit question. If your app only needs simple logs and fast deploys, AWS may feel like unnecessary machinery. If your app needs audited incidents, traceable failures, and production-grade escalation paths, observability becomes one more reason to consider leaving Railway.

Production Readiness Questions

Before migrating, evaluate your team's operational maturity.

Cost, AWS Can Be Cheaper, More Expensive, or Both

AWS cost is not one number. It is the sum of architectural choices.

A persistent myth in the developer community says moving to raw AWS is cheaper than using a PaaS because you cut out the middleman. This is an oversimplification that fails to account for Total Cost of Ownership.

There is a cost inversion at scale regarding raw compute. Because platforms like Railway mark up their compute to pay for the convenience they provide, a heavily scaled database becomes expensive. A database that costs $200/month on Railway might cost $80/month on RDS with reserved pricing.

This markup is industry standard. A Heroku Performance-M instance with 2.5 GB RAM costs $250/month, while a General Purpose instance with 4 GB RAM costs $80/month.

Railway pricing has changed multiple times, so treat pricing references as June 2026 figures. Railway's free access is limited and should not be treated as a production pricing strategy. New users receive a $5 one-time trial credit for up to 30 days. After that, Railway's docs say the account reverts to a Free plan with $1 of monthly credit. The paid Hobby plan is listed as a $5 minimum-usage plan that includes $5 of monthly usage credits.

The Hidden Cost of Owning Reliability

Raw AWS introduces a significant DevOps burden. It requires managing VPCs, security groups, SSL certificates, and building CI/CD pipelines from scratch. You cannot just git push.

The estimated human cost of a small team of two dedicated infrastructure engineers, including salary, benefits, and overhead, has been estimated to run up to $600K/year. Treat that as an upper-bound estimate rather than a universal law, but the direction is right: people cost can dominate raw infrastructure cost.

Railway is cheaper for the business until scale or risk changes the equation. AWS is cheaper on raw infrastructure in some cases, but expensive in human capital.

AWS may be the right exit path, but it is not the cheapest path if the team is not ready to operate it.

Verdict

AWS is the most complete option in this series for teams that are ready to own reliability directly. It gives you the best chance to reduce black-box platform dependency, contain blast radius, design stronger recovery paths, and make infrastructure decisions on your own terms.

It is also the easiest option to misuse. A poorly designed AWS architecture can cost more, fail harder, and create more operational noise than the Railway setup it replaced.

I would not recommend AWS to a team that simply wants a more convenient Railway. I would recommend evaluating AWS if Railway's outage exposed that your app has outgrown black-box platform dependency and your team is ready to operate production infrastructure seriously.

The deciding factor is not whether AWS has more services. It does. The deciding factor is whether your team is prepared to turn those services into a reliable system.

The conclusion is not everyone should move to AWS. The conclusion is that serious Railway users should stop treating Railway as the default and start testing realistic exit paths before another platform incident turns migration into an emergency.

Why I Looked at Render Last

AWS gives the most reliability primitives, but it may be too much for many Railway users. After looking at Fly.io, Vercel, and AWS, I came back to the practical question: what if I still want a managed PaaS, just with a different reliability posture?. That is why the final article compares Railway vs Render.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AWS more reliable than Railway for production workloads?

A well-designed AWS architecture can be more resilient than a simple Railway deployment. AWS does not make reliability automatic. The team must design, monitor, secure, and operate the system well.

Should startups move from Railway to AWS after an outage?

Not automatically. Startups should evaluate AWS when production risk, customer impact, compliance, or scale justify the operational burden. If the team cannot own AWS operations yet, a managed alternative may be a better intermediate step.

What is the biggest Railway vs AWS trade-off?

The biggest Railway vs AWS trade-off is convenience versus ownership. Railway gives speed and abstraction. AWS gives control, but that control only improves reliability when the team has the skills and processes to use it.

Is AWS cheaper than Railway in 2026?

It depends on the workload and architecture. AWS can be cheaper on raw compute and databases at scale, but teams must also model data transfer, logs, NAT gateways, managed services, support, monitoring, and operational time.

When should I choose AWS over Railway?

Choose AWS over Railway when your app has meaningful downtime impact, strict security requirements, compliance needs, custom networking requirements, database recovery requirements, or enough operational maturity to manage cloud infrastructure directly.

What Railway workloads are hardest to move to AWS?

Apps with multiple services, managed databases, background workers, secrets, custom domains, and deploy automation require careful planning. The hardest part is not only moving code. It is recreating the operational model.