The classic three-tier model needs an update. A 2026 guide to IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS, and the emerging agentic-PaaS tier, with concrete examples and a decision framework.
Narrower than the general multi-region listicle. Specifically the PaaS-shaped products that handle deploys, scaling, routing, and database adjacency across regions, with the seven regions Railway runs in as the anchor.
Continuous Deployment is not the same as CI/CD. An honest ranking of the platforms that handle the deploy half: rollouts, traffic shifting, rollback, environment promotion.
Monorepo discussions conflate two distinct categories: build orchestration (Turborepo, Nx, Bazel) and deploy platforms (Railway, Vercel, Render). A ranking that separates them and explains how they fit together.
A SOC 2 attestation tells you what a vendor was doing twelve months ago. Compliance is a posture, an operational discipline you can evaluate by looking at defaults, postmortems, and engineer ownership. The sequel to The F in SOC2 Stands for Functional.
What BYOC actually means, who needs it, who doesn't, and the platforms making serious BYOC plays in 2026.
Most teams searching 'best managed Kubernetes' should be asking 'do I actually need Kubernetes.' An honest ranking, with the four cases where K8s is the right answer and the cost of running it when it isn't.
Container registries are the under-thought-about piece of cloud infrastructure. The six jobs a real registry has to do, and an honest ranking of the platforms in 2026.