pdasika

I think the spaces are very interesting. I will use it for my weekly dose of arxiv paper reading.

I've also added a blog that illustrates the design differences between Terraform and Mantis. This includes code snippets. Thanks!

https://getmantis.ai/blog/how_mantis_iac_works

We analyzed GitPod's recent decision to leave Kubernetes, focusing on the fundamental mismatch between assumptions on Kubernetes and cloud development environment workloads. The post includes a detailed workload classification framework and explains why treating dev environments like 'pet daycare' rather than 'cattle' matters for architecture decisions.

1. link to sample repo here.

https://github.com/pranil-augur/mantis-sample-apps/blob/main...

2. Mantis principles https://mantis.getaugur.ai/docs/introduction/mantis_principl...

3. CUE primer https://mantis.getaugur.ai/docs/cue_reference/cue_language_o...

Thank you so much for the really pointy feedback. Will add examples in the README.

Three days. 72 sleepless hours. A corrupted MongoDB instance with a simple configuration error. Millions of dollars at stake. That’s what broke me.

My team was responsible for deployment of over 30 microservices across multiple clouds, directly in our enterprise on-prem customers’ environments. We thought we had it under control. We were SO wrong!.

The reality hit hard: Hour-long deployments stretched into months. Security reviews became endless loops. Integration issues multiplied exponentially. Key stakeholders vanished when we needed them most.

But that production incident with our important fintech client? That was different. As I watched my team burn out during those three days of firefighting, due to a misconfigured database, I realized something had to change.

Here’s the hard truth: The cloud was supposed to simplify things. Kubernetes was meant to make microservice management easier. Instead, we got more complexity, more toil, and more sleepless nights.

I’ve seen this pattern destroy teams across companies. I’ve watched brilliant engineers, engineering leaders and CISOs crumble under the weight of infrastructure chaos. — That’s why I built Mantis.

It’s not just another tool — it’s a complete reimagining of infrastructure configuration. One unified AI-powered engine replacing both Terraform and Helm. Modular configurations that actually work. Built-in validations that prevent disasters before they happen.

https://github.com/pranil-augur/mantis

Mantis takes a unique Makefile-style approach to task setup and execution. It addresses a key challenge: infrastructure-as-code (IaC) often does not need a Turing-complete language like TypeScript or Go, which tools like Pulumi and cdktf rely on. These languages, while powerful, can add unnecessary complexity to infrastructure management.

With Mantis, the focus is on simplicity and correctness through CUE, a superset of JSON, which is easy to learn and use. It offers templating, modularity, and policy enforcement within a single language, eliminating the need for separate tools like OPA or Rego for policy assertions. Mantis enables users to build task graphs with clear dependencies and ensures infrastructure consistency without introducing multiple abstraction layers.

By simplifying the IaC workflow while still maintaining flexibility, Mantis provides a lightweight yet powerful alternative to Pulumi and cdktf—one that reduces complexity without sacrificing expressiveness or control.