Infrastructure-as-Code

New Infrastructure-as-Code Tool “formae” Targets Terraform

Honghao Wang

— 3 min read
New Infrastructure-as-Code Tool “formae” Targets Terraform

2025-11-02 10:15 — Beijing

Infrastructure tooling company Platform Engineering Labs has launched an open-source Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platform called formae, aiming to address what it sees as the fundamental limitations of existing IaC solutions.

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🚀 Launch Overview

On October 22, 2025, Platform Engineering Labs positioned formae as the first major IaC innovation in nearly a decade.

Its focus: solve persistent challenges for platform engineering teams, including:

  • Sprawling cloud assets and complex inventories
  • Drift between code and production environments
  • Brittle toolchains that slow operations

Pavlo Baron, co-founder and CEO, described formae’s origin:

> We built formae from our own pain. It’s the first platform that starts from reality, not from an idealized plan. It accepts the messiest truths in any cloud environment and offers a safe, reliable way to evolve it.

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Core Features

formae operates in two distinct modes:

  • Reconciliation Mode – Aligns the desired environment state with the actual state in production.
  • Patch Mode – Applies incremental changes without full redeploys.

Key Innovations

  • No explicit state files — reality itself becomes the source of truth, version-controlled in code.
  • Agent-based architecture — decouples state management from clients.
  • Automatic discovery and codification – maps all resources in your cloud environment, regardless of whether they were:
  • Created via Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi
  • Manually provisioned in the console
  • Deployed using custom or legacy scripts

This approach contrasts sharply with traditional IaC tools, which require starting from a clean plan and maintaining separate state files tied to the provisioning tool.

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Technology Choice: PKL vs. HCL

formae uses PKL, a configuration-as-code language originally created by Apple, instead of the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) used by Terraform and OpenTofu.

Industry Reactions:

  • Adam Jacob (CEO, System Initiative) noted PKL’s adoption "could be good or bad, depending on your philosophy toward external DSLs."
  • Praised:
  • The separation of inventory and resource declarations
  • Ability to query inventory and generate declarations dynamically
  • Clear documentation and well-defined abstractions

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Design Philosophy

Marc Schnitzius, Head of Platform Engineering at codecentric:

> formae doesn’t just shift complexity from development to operations — it truly helps reduce cognitive load for developers and operations teams by abstracting the complexity of modern cloud-native environments.

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Market Context

formae enters a space dominated by:

  • Terraform
  • OpenTofu

These already feature:

  • Large ecosystems
  • Strong multi-cloud support
  • Workflow automation platforms (e.g., Spacelift)

formae’s differentiation lies in:

  • Auto-discovery of infrastructure
  • Risk-minimized updates via incremental change modes

Its success hinges on whether the discovery-and-codification model delivers more value than established tools’ ecosystem advantages.

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Licensing & Community

  • Licensed under Platform Engineering Labs’ Functional Source License
  • Ensures open-source accessibility while supporting commercial sustainability
  • Early adopters can:
  • Experiment without budget constraints
  • Contribute to the project

Resources:

  • GitHub repository
  • Active Discord community
  • Introductory blog post with further technical details

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Wider Context

In the evolving cloud-native landscape, automation and intelligence are reshaping infrastructure workflows. For engineering teams seeking to share IaC best practices or tutorials across platforms, initiatives like AiToEarn官网 can help by:

  • Generating AI-assisted content
  • Publishing simultaneously to global and Chinese platforms
  • Tracking performance and engagement metrics

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Harry Brumleve, founder of Thoughtful Software, called formae:

> A significant evolutionary leap forward in DevOps and software development.

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Original Article:

https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/10/iac-formae/

Disclaimer: Translated from InfoQ. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.

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If you’d like, I can also create a comparative feature table of formae vs. Terraform and OpenTofu to make the distinctions instantly clear.

Would you like me to add that?

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