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So you want to build your own data center

When it comes to infrastructure engineering, building a data center is probably closer to building a house than to deploying a Terraform stack.

Your applications deployed to Railway will want to connect to a diverse mix of endpoints over the network — be it a home internet user in Sydney, Australia or a API hosted on an AWS server in the US. Contractor: “We need longer power cables” - the PDUs at that site were upside down because the power came in from the floor, so our socket numbering was reversed in the plan Phonecall from Amsterdam: “There’s no demarcation point at the site?” - a specific facility installs external fibre links direct to a box in one of our racks rather than via a dedicated demarcation point overhead Railway Discord quote: “Why are the phases wired so weirdly on this PDU?” - the facility was wired differently to our other sites and the power sockets were wired phase-to-neutral vs. phase-to-phase (WYE vs Delta circuits for you EE’s) Contractor: “Your data cables are too short” - the contractor didn’t realize the network gear was reverse-airflow and tried to mount things the wrong way around Us raising a support ticket: “There’s no link coming up on this cable” - the fiber was wired in the wrong polarity; we learnt what “rolling fibre cables” was that day… it’s when they rip out the plugs from the LC connector and swap them around Railway Discord quote: “I brought a rubber mallet from HomeDepot today” - a batch of nearly 24 PDUs from one vendor were delivered with faulty sockets that didn’t properly engage with the power plugs, even with appropriate extreme mechanical force being applied In the space of the last few months we’ve built two new software tools, Railyard and MetalCP, to enable a button click experience from designing a new cage, tracing and visualizing the cabling, to installing OSes on servers and getting them on the internet.

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