Platform Engineering Labs has come up with a creative solution to the inefficiencies that continue to plague most infrastructure-as-code platforms.
The startup announced the launch of a new open-source IaC platform called “formae”, which the company says keeps its state automatically up-to-date with the reality of the infrastructure and cloud estate.
Formae is built to be compiler-grade, type-safe, and drift-aware. It automatically discovers what’s running in an environment and converts that into versioned, continuously synced code.
By validating configurations through strict schemas and applying changes safely, formae minimizes human error and configuration drift. Unlike traditional IaC tools that rely on outdated files, it serves as a live, accurate source of truth grounded in real infrastructure.
The user decides if they want to keep changes that happened outside of their own code or not, with the idea being formae doesn’t create any new responsibilities for platform teams.
“It rather allows them to master and enjoy their already existing ones by removing unnecessary toil and human error from infrastructure management,” explains Platform Engineering Labs co-founder & CEO Pavlo Baron.
He points out that classic IaC comes at the cost of bloating workflows and making them much more complicated than they need to be.
“Management of state files that are disconnected from code and bad DevEx with the user forced to be part of the tool are the result of the tool design and just a few aspects that make those workflows slow and brittle,” he says.
Formae, on the other hand, is designed to support any workflow without creating artificial slowdowns.
“It fits into your GitOps, it allows you to keep your own code in sync according to your own preferences and rules, and it embraces the reality that there are different tools that teams use to make changes to infrastructure in any granularity – including ClickOps,” Baron says. “You are ultimately in control, seeing and making every change as code.”
Type-safety and schema validation, two closely related software engineering concepts that help ensure infrastructure code (and software in general) behaves predictably and securely, are central to formae’s design.
In a type-safe system, the compiler or interpreter checks that you’re using each type correctly before the code is executed. This prevents common configuration and runtime errors, such as trying to assign a text value (“example”) to a variable expecting a number (100).
Schema validation is the process of checking whether a configuration file (or any structured data, like JSON or YAML) follows a predefined format, or schema.
“Stronger typing is a safety net that is essential to survival,” Baron says. “Not to have it is simply gambling, and gambling has no home in operations.”
He adds formae doesn’t require you to migrate anything, but rather is built for co-existence.
“It is an illusion to think that in a larger enterprise, for example, one tool will rule it all,” Baron says. “So formae, while being a fully-fledged IaC platform itself, allows you to adopt it at your own speed, meeting you where you are and giving you a complete, single source of truth.”
This means an organization can keep using its Terraform and learn how formae solves it better.
“You can approach formae cautiously, because everything in operations is about being cautious,” Baron says. “What formae ultimately gives you is that suddenly, once you start using it, you will stop thinking about jacking it all in and gardening. Instead, you will finally have fun again in your difficult job.”
He says he looks at platform engineering as a chance to break out of the tool misery and demand or create new ways of dealing with complexity and speed.
“The most important skills are curiosity and being open-minded,” Baron says.