Railway: The Agent-Native Cloud — Jake Cooper

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This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal <> GCP <> AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.

Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.

It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.

For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.

Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.

From rebuilding Railway’s network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway’s founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.

We go deep on Railway’s infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.

We discuss:

* How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week

* How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species

* Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale

* The economics of Railway’s own-metal data centers and three-month payback

* How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure

* Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups

* Central Station, Railway’s internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents

* Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms

* Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents

* Temporal’s strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents

* Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems

* Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets

* Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers

* The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company building

Railway:

* Website: https://railway.com/

* X: https://x.com/Railway

Jake Cooper:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/

* X: https://x.com/JustJake

Timestamps

00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?00:02:07 Jake’s Path to Railway00:06:13 Railway’s Six-Year Growth Story00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform00:13:29 Railway’s Infrastructure Philosophy00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing00:23:31 Data Centers in Space00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud01:28:20 Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Alessio [00:00:00]: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I’m joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.

Swyx [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we’re in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.

Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.

Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.

Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.

Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?

Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. I don’t have a business card. We’re not that big yet. At some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, “Damn, this is pretty official.”

Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.

Jake [00:00:32]: They’re cool. They’re hip. The conductor thing is good. We’re trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it’s super cringe and say, “You don’t need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don’t have a really good one.

Jake [00:00:55]: We’ve got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.

Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don’