Question: “Why no public buckets on Railway?”

This question came up a few times, and it’s not an easy yes or no. They will come at some point, with more time. In the end, this was kinda my onboarding project and I have to scope stuff.

Public Buckets are good for static sites, but it’s already easy to host static sites on Railway. Buckets are cheaper, but the added benefit for the platform isn’t as huge as private buckets, so they weren’t high on the list of priorities.

Bucket UX is not super easy to get right, and many providers solve this with a list of configurations and assuming that users will know what they all mean and when to use them. Public buckets have lots of footguns. It’s not rare to hear about security incidents involving wrong configuration of public buckets. For most things that aren’t just static assets, you want a backend for authorization.

For caching and saving egress on static assets, CDNs work great. I’m using Cloudflare’s CDN for my stuff, and we’re also cooking on making it easier to add a CDN.

Is the solution just a “public” checkbox? Maybe it will be, but it’s not super clear to me if it really is the best way. If I would’ve went down that path and added it, it would’ve likely resulted in more than just a checkbox. It risks turning into a configuration hell where you don’t really know what those settings will actually do, and combined with the security issues, the end result risks causing more issues. Maybe even so many more issues that I’d rather want to remove it again to solve it better in the future, but you can’t simply take features away.

Ideally we have something that doesn’t require you to know what a bucket actually is, what the difference between a bucket and a CDN is, and what “public” or “private” actually means. Something that works perfectly for what you’re trying to build.