The cognitive tax of Terraform and Kubernetes for application developers

Terraform and Kubernetes, while powerful infrastructure tools, often create a cognitive burden for application developers who are expected to use them, despite these tools being designed for infrastructure specialists. This mismatch leads to slowed delivery, increased risk, and a diversion of focus from product development to infrastructure management, which includes dealing with complex issues like resource lifecycles and dependency graphs. Developers, who are primarily focused on application logic, face challenges in understanding the full impact of their configuration changes, often resulting in fragile systems and unexpected outages. Upsun aims to alleviate this burden by providing a platform that automates infrastructure tasks and ensures environment parity across development, staging, and production, allowing developers to focus on application code and logic. By shifting the infrastructure responsibilities to the platform, Upsun provides a consistent, predictable environment that reduces cognitive overload and fosters a more efficient and reliable development process.