Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ask a compliance team where their EU customer data lives, and most will point confidently at a dashboard showing a Frankfurt or Dublin region. Ask their legal counsel whether that data is beyond the reach of a foreign government demand, and the confidence usually drops. Those are two different questions. Since 12 September 2025 there has been a dated EU obligation that turns on the second one rather than the first.

Before he joined Upsun, Andrew Kester spoiled the biggest sale of a client's year. He was one of two or three web developers at a creative agency that did branding, logos, print, and websites. A design boutique was about to run its annual trunk show, and the discounts and featured brands were meant to stay secret until the reveal on Tuesday at noon. The client asked for a preview. The preview reached production.

A team ships at a steady pace for most of the year. Then an audit approaches, and delivery slows. Engineers get pulled off feature work to support the audit, producing the configuration exports, logs, and environment checks that the evidence depends on. The slowdown lasts as long as the audit does. It is tempting to read this as a team that needs to move faster or be bigger. It is usually neither.

As a product manager at Upsun with a computer engineering background, Kateryna Dvornichenko had spent months researching competing tools in the agentic development space, running tests, comparing features, and building a picture of where the market was heading. She realized the tools were impressive, but something kept standing out. "Collaboration was not the strong point of any of them," she says. "Everyone stays on their own machine with their own setup.".