One-Second Deploys? We Didn't Believe It Either

a year ago

The author shares their struggle with setting up a simple script for product alerts, which took over two hours to deploy using traditional cloud services.
They introduce Railway Functions, a new feature that allows deploying code in under 5 seconds without the need for package managers, GitHub repos, IaC, or container builds.
Railway Functions streamline the deployment process by parsing source code into an AST, determining dependencies, and installing them using Bun, which is significantly faster than other package managers.
The feature supports TypeScript out of the box and aims to add more language support in the future.
Functions run on the same infrastructure as Railway Services, allowing the use of volumes, variables, and other familiar features.
The author emphasizes the transformative impact of reducing deployment time to seconds, enabling faster experimentation and iteration.
Users can start with Railway Functions by adding a new Function service on the Railway canvas, with provided code examples including a REST API, JSX landing page, and cron utility.

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