The Cognitive Ceiling of Declarative Cloud

Cloud infrastructure engineering has progressed through successive layers of abstraction. Metal hardware is giving way to virtual machines, virtual machines are evolving into flexible cloud primitives, and ad hoc manual provisioning is being replaced by Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Using Terraform, OpenTofu, Azure Bicep, and ARM templates, engineering teams created repeatable, state auditable, and version-controlled GitOps workflows. However, declarative IaC essentially answers only one static question: What infrastructure must be in place at deployment time?

Modern distributed systems expose the limits of this static paradigm.…