Platform Engineering Labs unveils formae to simplify cloud IaC

Platform Engineering Labs has launched formae, an open source infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform aimed at addressing the challenges faced by modern software engineering teams managing cloud environments at scale.

The company describes formae as a response to limitations in existing IaC tools such as Terraform, focusing on reducing complexity, risk, and manual intervention in infrastructure management. The platform was developed to help engineers automate infrastructure tasks across distributed systems.

Addressing complexity

Platform teams are facing increased complexity from expansive cloud estates and often experience discrepancies between their code and live environments. Existing tools, typically designed for smaller systems or single users, have struggled to keep pace with the needs of modern distributed infrastructure. These teams frequently encounter issues such as fragile toolchains and increased time spent addressing outages or resolving integration challenges, rather than building resilient systems.

According to Platform Engineering Labs, formae takes an alternative approach to these problems by automatically discovering and codifying an organisation's entire IT environment, regardless of how or where the infrastructure was created. All changes become versioned code, with each resource tracked, allowing for collaborative contributions by engineers with reduced risk of error.

"We built formae out of our own pain," said Pavlo Baron, co-founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs. "It is the first platform that starts from reality, not from an idealised plan. It accepts even the messiest truth of any cloud environment and provides a safe, reliable way to evolve it. It's time to sunset Terraform and move forward."

Key features

formae works through code exclusively. Engineers can extract, apply, or destroy infrastructure-either at the level of single resources or entire stacks-using code artefacts referred to as "formas." Some of the platform's core features include:

• Automatic codification, turning all infrastructure resources and changes into versioned, declarative code to eliminate drift.
• Automatic discovery and synchronisation, mapping every running resource across the cloud estate.
• Patch-based incremental updates to reduce risk during modifications.
• No requirement for manual state management, with state versioned in code and kept up to date.
• Schema-safe and declarative configuration for predictability and consistency.
• An agent-based model that separates change and state management from the client side, enabling safe asynchronous convergence.
• Extensibility for open-source and commercial integration and plugins.

These features are designed to allow engineers to work entirely through code while addressing problems like hidden drift, brittle state files, and potential for outages. By unifying resources across different creation methods-including tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and even legacy scripts-formae aims to simplify infrastructure management for platform teams.

Industry perspectives

Feedback from the software engineering industry highlights formae's developer-focused design. Marc Schnitzius, Platform Engineering Lead at codecentric, commented, "formae is designed for developers and platform engineers from the ground up. While this is a crucial pattern, formae doesn't just move complexity from dev to ops - it truly helps achieve reduced cognitive load for both developers and operations teams by abstracting the complexity on both sides in modern cloud-native environments."

The formae project has been released under the FSL license, which the company states will offer accessibility and safety for users while sustaining a commercial business model. The open source model is intended to encourage community involvement from enterprises or individuals at any budget level.

Harry Brumleve, Founder of Thoughtful Software and a Fortune 250 Executive, supported formae's role in shaping the future of development operations and software. He said, "formae is a significant evolutionary leap forward in both devops and software development. It represents a shift in thinking as fundamental as source control, as practical as package management, and as vital as Observability. formae's impact will extend beyond improving the lives of DevOps and Engineering teams to creating lasting and reliable value for businesses and their customers."

Availability

formae is available now via Github, allowing for contributions and engagement from the wider developer community. Platform Engineering Labs will also host discussions related to the project on Discord to facilitate further input and adoption.