DEVOPSdigest

Platform Engineering Labs announced the launch of formae, an open source infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform designed to address fundamental insufficiencies of tools like Terraform.

formae automatically discovers and codifies an organization's entire environment, whatever its origin, into a single, unified source of truth. Every change is versioned code, every resource is tracked, and every engineer can contribute with confidence.

"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 idealized 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."

formae delivers the following core capabilities that set it apart from other IaC offerings:

- Full Infrastructure-as-Code - engineers work with formae exclusively through code. Single resources or whole infrastructure stacks can be extracted, applied or destroyed in any granularity using persisted or ephemeral code artefacts called "formas."

- Automatic codification - formae transforms every infrastructure resource and every change into versioned, declarative code, eliminating infrastructure and state drift.

- Automatic discovery and synchronization - it continuously maps every running resource across your entire cloud estate, regardless of how it was created or modified.

- Patch-based changes with minimal blast radius – formae enables precise, incremental updates that reduce risk and improve reliability during infrastructure modifications.

- No explicit state management - State is reality itself, versioned in code and always up-to-date.

- Schema-safe and declarative - formae ensures environments are consistent and predictable, without unnecessary human error and labor.

- Agent-based - Change and state management is decoupled from the clients, allowing careful, asynchronous state convergence towards declared target state

- Extensible and open - A future foundation for a rich ecosystem of open-source and commercial plugins, integrations, and enterprise extensions

By unifying all resources, whether created via patches with minimal blast radius, Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, ClickOps, or legacy scripts, formae provides platform teams with the ultimate benefit of managing infrastructure without fear of hidden drift, brittle state, or unrecoverable outages and is achieved entirely through what they love - code.

formae is released under the FSL license, ensuring immediate accessibility and full safety for the adopters, while enabling a sustainable commercial model. The open source release encourages community contributions, experimentation, and adoption at any budget level.

formae is available today on Github. The project is open for contributions, with community discussions hosted on Discord.