Platform Engineering Labs launches ‘formae’ to fix broken infrastructure-as-code – News

Platform Engineering Labs Inc. might not have the most imaginative name, but it has come up with a creative solution to the inefficiencies that continue to plague most infrastructure-as-code platforms.

The startup, which was operating under the radar until today, has announced the launch of a new, open-source IaC platform called “formae,” saying it’s the industry’s first major innovation in almost a decade.

IaC refers to the practice of managing and provisioning information technology infrastructure such as compute and storage resources using machine-readable definition files. It does away with the need for cloud platform engineers to spend hours manually adjusting all kinds of settings in their cloud environments. IaC can be used to automate the setup of servers, networks and other resources, and can help to dramatically speed up application deployment times.

The industry is dominated by platforms such as HashiCorp’s Terraform and its open-source rival OpenTofu, along with alternatives such as Pulumi Corp. The likes of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. also compete in IaC with their AWS CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager tools, which are native to their own cloud platforms.

However, while IaC certainly saves engineering teams a lot of time and hassle, Platform Engineering believes that a lot of inefficiencies remain to be addressed. The most pressing challenge is that existing IaC platforms are generally designed for single cloud platforms rather than the reality of distributed cloud environments that almost all large enterprises live in today. Because of this, engineering teams are forced to spend time stitching together integrations and fixing outages that result from multicloud complexity.

Fixing IaC

With the launch of formae, Platform Engineering thinks it can solve these problems. Whereas existing IaC tools rely on brittle state files and require endless babysitting, formae accelerates automation. When installed, it sets about discovering and codifying an organization’s entire cloud environment, covering every application and service, no matter where it lives, creating a single source of unified truth. It tracks every resource and every change to the underlying code.

One of the main advantages of this approach is portability. With formae, engineers work exclusively with code, and can extract, apply or destroy everything from single resources to entire infrastructure stacks using persisted or ephemeral code artifacts known as “formas.”

Because every infrastructure resource and change is transformed into versioned, declarative code, the formae platform also helps to eliminate problems around infrastructure and state drift. This drift is all too common, caused when engineers make manual changes and modifications to cloud resources outside of the IaC management process.

That means their actual state differs from the defined state in their IaC files, creating operational problems and security risks. Formae ensures this drift won’t happen, as its automatic discovery tools continuously map every running resource, tracking each change or modification, the company said.

Other benefits of formae include being able to implement more precise, patch-based updates to infrastructure. Teams can therefore introduce incremental upgrades, while minimizing the “blast radius” of these changes, so that if any problems occur as a result of the changes, their impact will be lessened and quick fixes or reversals can be implemented. Moreover, because formae is agent-based, it means that change and state management are decoupled from clients, enabling companies to carefully converge their resource settings to a declared target state.

Open-source and extensible

Like the increasingly popular OpenTofu project, which has gained massive traction since Hashicorp introduced controversial changes to Terraform’s licensing terms, formae is fully open-source, and already offers a rich ecosystem of commercial plugins, extensions and integrations with third-party tools.

Platform Engineering co-founder and Chief Executive Pavlo Baron said the biggest difference between formae and other IaC platform is that it begins with reality, rather than trying to start with an idealized plan. By mapping every application, service and resource, it “accepts even the messiest truth of any cloud environment,” he said. Then, once it has everything figured out, it “provides a safe, reliable way to evolve those environments.”

According to Baron, the main advantage of formae is that it allows teams to manage their cloud infrastructure without fearing hidden drift, brittle states or outages that may be virtually impossible to recover from.

The software is available on GitHub under a temporary Functional Source License, the company explained. This allows users to run, study, modify and distribute the software while protecting its interests as it figures out a plan to commercialize it. After two years, the FSL licenses will automatically convert to a more permissive alternative such as Apache 2.0 after two years, balancing user freedom with developer sustainability.

Image: Platform Engineering Labs/Medium