Your Guardrails Are Bullshit
Every infrastructure company likes to talk about guardrails, but the reality is guardrails are too late.
When I was in high school, I crashed my car into guardrails.
I didn’t fly off the edge and die, but my dad was certainly pissed about the car.
The insurance premium adjustment sucked.
The fact of the matter is, when you hit guardrails, the damage is already done:
- It causes unnecessary communication with ops to figure out what you "did wrong" (and you wait).
- It’s exhausting to make PR after PR, changing configuration values while you push-and-pray that this time it’ll be green.
- It erodes the trust you’re trying to build—between teams and in the process itself.
We don’t need guardrails as an industry. We need lane assist.
Tooling that keeps you from fucking up in the first place but still lets you break free if you need to.
Beyond Guardrails: Building Platforms with proactive context-aware constraints
Guardrails might help you avoid disaster, but they don’t make your life easier. They’re reactive, cumbersome, and only useful after damage has already occurred. What if, instead of relying on guardrails, we designed infrastructure with proactive constraints that guide developers in real time?
Take Postgres versioning as an example. When you use proactive constraints with a platform built around your Infrastructure as Code (IaC), you can do something like this:
- Developers can create a cluster using any version of Postgres above 12.
- Once the cluster is created, they can only upgrade it in minor version increments.
This approach does more than just prevent mistakes. It extends self-service to day two operations.
Developers don’t need to open tickets or wait on ops—they can upgrade their own databases safely and independently. Rules are enforced contextually: no downgrades that risk data loss, no major upgrades that cause downtime.
Contrast this with guardrails using Open Policy Agent (OPA). Sure, you could write rules to enforce these constraints. But now you’re managing more code, more complexity, and potentially an OPA server.
Did you write tests for that code? Probably not.
Did you ensure the OPA rules are deployed consistently across every environment? Good luck.
All this effort, and you’ve only managed to stop developers from breaking things. You haven’t empowered them to move faster.
Now consider region selection.
Imagine a developer creates a DynamoDB table. With Terraform, the region is a string they can change later. Change the region, and Terraform happily deletes the table and recreates it, wiping out all your data.
With proactive constraints baked into a UI:
- Developers can select from a predefined list of regions during table creation.
- After the table is created, the region becomes immutable.
No extra code, no additional servers to run, no copying rules everywhere. You’ve prevented accidental deletions and ensured your data stays safe, all while maintaining developer autonomy.
The Power of Proactive Platforms
This is the power of moving beyond guardrails to a proactive, UI-driven approach to infrastructure. When developers interact with a controlled form, they get real-time guidance that enforces business rules. You retain flexibility, but in a way that’s safe, intuitive, and requires no extra overhead.
Instead of writing and maintaining endless guardrails, you’re empowering your team with a system that:
- Enforces constraints contextually – based on the current state of the resource.
- Removes complexity – no more brittle, hard-to-maintain rules scattered across your codebases.
- Enables self-service – from creation to day two operations. Self-service that doesn't extend to day two is just more work for your ops team.
Guardrails are reactive. UIs with constraints are proactive. They don’t just stop you from screwing up—they make it harder to screw up in the first place while enabling developers to move faster and safer.
Until you embrace proactive, ops-approved IaC, your guardrails are just strangling the last bit of life out of DevOps.
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