Be able to focus on what matters to you

If you feel like your week gets swallowed by meetings, config churn, and “quick fixes,” you are not imagining it. Multiple independent studies show significant time losses from firefighting and inefficiencies, rather than creative work. Cisco reports developers spend more than 57% of their time being dragged into ‘war rooms’ to solve application performance issues, rather than investing their time developing new, cutting-edge software applications as part of their organization’s innovation strategy¹ ². 

The result: less time building features, more time switching context between fixing your workflows, infrastructure, pipelines, settings, and occasionally some actual development.

But there is an alternate path: a workflow where environments appear automatically for each branch, data clones safely, and instrumentation is built in so you can focus on code, not fixing the plumbing. This is the day-to-day experience Upsun aims to make normal for every developer.

Developer productivity without the infrastructure management drag

What keeps you from staying in flow is rarely the tasks assigned to you. It is the meta-work around the work: provisioning, wiring services, fighting flaky staging, and proving a fix will behave in production. A cloud application platform can remove these chores by turning Git into the control plane and standardizing the environment shape across branches. This aligns with DORA position that standardization and platform capabilities correlate with better delivery and team well-being⁵ ⁶.

On Upsun, all of your infrastructure is declared once as a single config.yaml file in your Git repo. Push your code, and the platform builds, deploys, and routes everything for you. Every Git branch can be its own live environment, with all the services and data cloned from its parent. That means realistic previews for reviewers, and zero “works on my machine” debates because they can see it in a live environment that is a byte-for-byte copy of production.

• Use a single config file to define applications, services, relationships, routes, build hooks, deploy hooks, and workers (all versioned alongside code). See What is Upsun.
• Connect GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket so pull requests spin up production-grade preview environments automatically.

A cloud application platform for application modernization

Modernizing an app is easier when your platform standardizes, deploys, and surfaces performance data in one place. Upsun integrates profiling and monitoring so you can see regressions early, not during an incident. You can also use built-in continuous profiling to compare builds over time. If you need to centralize events and monitoring, you can also forward all the platform logs to New Relic, Splunk, or Sumo Logic.

• Forward logs to third-party observability tools.
• Use continuous profiling to spot hot paths over time.

Explore Blackfire for full-stack observability with Upsun.

Platform engineering that developers actually like

“Platform engineering” should not mean weeks of pipeline creation and maintenance. Upsun provides guardrails so teams can codify best practices once and reuse them across repositories, with multi-service orchestration and predictable environments. Your AI coding assistants can even gain structured context through our CLI or MCP, helping them generate changes that match your runtime and services.

• Learn how MCP fits modern app workflows.
• Connect an MCP server to a remote database for safe, contextual AI assistance.

What this looks like in practice

Here is a minimal, Git-driven .upsun/config.yaml that defines a web app, a worker, and a database. Commit and push; the platform handles build, deploy, routing, and relationships.

applications:
  web:
    type: "php:8.2"
    build:
      flavor: composer
    relationships:
      database: "db:mysql"
    web:
      locations:
        "/":
          # The public directory of the app, relative to its root.
          root: "public"
          # The front-controller script to send non-static requests to.
          passthru: "/index.php"
    workers:
      queue:
        commands:
          start: "php bin/console messenger:consume async"
services:
  db:
    type: "mysql:10.6"
routes:
  "https://{default}/":
    type: upstream
    upstream: "web:http"

• See the config structure in the docs.
• Push to create or update environments.

Safe previews with instant data cloning and sanitization

Realistic previews are only useful if your test data is safe. Upsun lets you clone live data into non-production environments and sanitize PII so reviewers can test with confidence. Start from the parent, clone, then sanitize using the examples for your stack.

• Clone data as you create new environments.
• Sanitize PostgreSQL or MariaDB data.

If you prefer a deeper dive, this preview primer shows how the building blocks fit together.

Why it matters for developer productivity

• You spend less time wiring infra and more time solving app problems.
• Reviewers get production-grade previews per branch, so feedback cycles shrink.
• Profiling and logs are on by default, so you catch issues before incidents.
• Costs are more predictable, with visibility into usage and resources.

Independent research aligns with this direction. The DORA program links stable technical practices to strong delivery outcomes⁵ ⁶. At the same time, Atlassian’s 2025 DevEx report shows 68 percent of developers now save over 10 hours weekly with AI, yet organizational friction still erodes those gains² ⁷. That is why standardization and self-serve environments matter: they reduce the friction that steals your week.

Getting started in minutes

1. Connect your Git provider; Upsun will create environments for branches and pull requests.
2. Add a .upsun/config.yaml with our upsun init cli command to declare apps and services.
3. Enable log forwarding or profiling as needed.
4. Clone data and sanitize it for safe previews.

Upsun is built to get applications into production and keep them there, so you can create without the constant drag of infrastructure management.

Who this helps

• Developers who want to stay in flow and ship.
• Teams practicing platform engineering and application modernization at scale.
• Any org looking for a cloud application platform that favors speed, simplicity, and reliability.

Sources

1. Developers spend more time firefighting than innovating, according to Cisco's newsroom.
2. Atlassian State of Developer Experience 2025, summary blog.
3. DORA 2024 report overview.
4. Google Cloud on DORA’s four key metrics.
5. State of Developer Experience 2025, report hub.