Railyard next to raw AWS.

AWS gives you EC2, RDS, an Application Load Balancer, IAM, a VPC, Route 53 and CloudWatch as separate services you provision and wire together, by hand or with Terraform or CloudFormation. Railyard attaches the same kind of server and does that wiring for you.

The difference

AWS sells the parts. Railyard wires them.

Nothing below is hypothetical: the same AWS services, the same instance types, the same RDS engine. The difference is who clicks through the console, writes the Terraform, or reads the docs to get them talking to each other.

Piece	On raw AWS	Through Railyard
Compute	Launch an EC2 instance yourself: pick an AMI, an instance type, a key pair and a security group, by console, CLI or Terraform.	Attach an EC2 instance you already have with its host, a user and an SSH key, same as any other Linux box. Or connect your AWS account and let Railyard launch one, from t3.small up to m5.xlarge, in any of 13 regions.
Security groups	A new security group starts with no inbound rules at all. Every port, including SSH and your database, is yours to open.	Railyard opens 22, 80 and 443 on a security group it creates and manages, and opens the database port only to the server that runs your app, not to the internet.
HTTPS and load balancing	An Application Load Balancer is billed separately: $0.0225 an hour plus about $0.008 per LCU-minute, roughly $22 a month for a light workload by AWS's own example, and you still issue and renew certificates yourself through ACM.	Every domain gets HTTPS automatically through Railyard's edge, renewed for you. No load balancer or certificate to provision.
Database	RDS is billed separately for instance hours, storage and backup storage past your retention window. Multi-AZ is an extra charge, not on by default, and the subnet group, security group and backup retention period are yours to set.	Railyard provisions the same RDS Postgres instance through the AWS API: subnet group, a security group scoped to your app server, encryption and tags included, then runs scheduled, verified backups with point-in-time restore. A db.t4g.micro instance runs about $12 a month. Postgres, MySQL and Redis work the same way on any provider, not only AWS.
DNS	Route 53 costs $0.50 a month per hosted zone for the first 25, plus per-million-query charges, and the A, AAAA or alias records to your load balancer are yours to create.	Point whatever DNS you already use at Railyard once. No hosted zone required unless you want one.
Logs and monitoring	CloudWatch Logs keeps log data indefinitely until you set a retention policy yourself, and alarms, dashboards and metric filters are separate resources you build.	Build and runtime logs, drains to any HTTPS or syslog endpoint, and alerts ship with every deploy, no retention policy to configure first.
Access	IAM users, roles and policies you write and keep least-privilege yourself.	Connecting an AWS account creates one scoped IAM role through a CloudFormation stack, with an external ID. Railyard never sees or needs your AWS root credentials.

Where AWS still does the job

This is not a claim that Railyard replaces AWS.

AWS's own breadth: 200-plus services like Lambda, SageMaker and Bedrock that Railyard does not touch.
Enterprise compliance programs (HIPAA eligibility, FedRAMP, PCI DSS attestations) that come with an AWS enterprise agreement.
Globally distributed, multi-region infrastructure at AWS's own scale.

This page is for the person who wants to run an app, not learn AWS. If you need the rest of AWS, keep using AWS directly; Railyard just takes the EC2-plus-RDS-plus-load-balancer-plus-Route-53 part off your plate.

Moving over

If you already have an EC2 instance, you do not migrate it. You attach it.

Point Railyard at the instance's host, a user and an SSH key, the same as any other server. Railyard installs the agent, reads what is already running, and takes over the deploy pipeline from there. If you want Railyard to manage the database too, bring it over with a standard dump and restore; if you would rather not touch AWS again, create the next server on Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Vultr instead, and Railyard treats it the same way.

Read the migration guide →

Questions

AWS questions

Does Railyard replace all of AWS?

No. It replaces the part of AWS most apps actually use to run a single service: an EC2 instance, an RDS database, a load balancer's job, IAM for that one connection, and CloudWatch's logging job. It does not touch Lambda, SageMaker, compliance programs or AWS's global network. Keep using AWS directly for those.

What does this cost compared to running it on AWS directly?

You pay AWS directly for the EC2 instance and the RDS instance, at AWS's own on-demand rates, the same as if you had provisioned them yourself. What you do not pay for separately is an Application Load Balancer at $0.0225 an hour plus LCU charges, a Route 53 hosted zone at $0.50 a month, or the time spent wiring IAM, security groups and a deploy pipeline by hand. Railyard itself is a flat price per team: free to start, $19 a month on Pro, $49 a month on Team.

Can I use my existing AWS account?

Yes. Connect it with a one-click CloudFormation stack that creates a scoped IAM role with an external ID, no root access keys required, or paste an access key ID and secret directly if you would rather manage the credential yourself. Either way, Railyard only calls the EC2 and RDS actions it needs.

What if I would rather not use AWS at all?

Then do not. Create the server on Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Vultr instead; Railyard provisions the database, HTTPS and deploy pipeline the same way regardless of which one you pick.

What we checked

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