Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service vs Railway

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service for building, running, and scaling production applications across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. It manages Kubernetes control-plane availability across three AWS Availability Zones and replaces unhealthy control-plane nodes automatically. Applications can run on Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate. EKS Auto Mode automates provisioning for compute, storage, and networking, along with scaling, operating-system patching, and add-on management. Hybrid deployments can use Hybrid Nodes, AWS Outposts, or EKS Anywhere. EKS remains compatible with upstream Kubernetes applications and tools, and integrates with IAM role-based access control, VPC pod networking, and Application Load Balancers. EKS Capabilities provides managed Argo CD for GitOps across clusters. There are no minimum fees or upfront commitments, but worker resources and related traffic are billed separately. Standard version support is $0.10 a month, billed per cluster hour.

Railway is a deployment platform for teams that want to provision infrastructure, develop locally against it, and deploy services to the cloud. Projects can start from Docker images, GitHub repositories, local repositories, container registries, or templates. Railway offers PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis database templates with built-in backups, plus persistent volumes with up to 5 TB of storage. Networking includes public and private options, TCP proxying, custom domains, and managed TLS certificates. Services can scale vertically, horizontally, and across four regions. Operational tools include logs retained for up to 90 days, configurable dashboards, distributed tracing, health checks, usage limits, and alerts. Teams can use unlimited environments, pull-request and preview deployments, GitHub branch deploys, approval gates, audit logs, and rollbacks. Railway also provides a GraphQL API, a CLI, and iOS and Android apps for deploying, monitoring, and managing services. The Trial plan includes a one-time $5 free credit; Hobby costs $5 a month and Pro costs $20 a month. Enterprise pricing is custom.