Railway is a cloud platform designed to simplify the process of building, shipping, and scaling applications. It abstracts away the complexities of traditional cloud infrastructure, providing developers with a streamlined workflow to deploy code directly from a Git repository. The platform automatically handles provisioning, networking, and scaling, and supports various services like databases (PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB), cron jobs, and custom Dockerfiles. Its key value is its 'infrastructure as code' approach combined with a user-friendly interface and a usage-based pricing model, making it an efficient alternative to more complex cloud providers for individual developers and teams.