Introduction

Platform teams today are struggling with the immense complexity of their cloud estates. Despite using modern IaC tools, they are constantly fighting a losing battle against infrastructure drift, undocumented changes, and the operational messiness that comes from using various tools and sources of truth.

That's where formae comes in. It's an IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code) platform that unifies your live environment into a single, versioned system of record, giving you the power to safely manage and evolve it with code.

What makes formae different is that it's the only platform that accepts reality, constantly and automatically discovering and codifying your entire environment into a single source of truth. This is what provides the ultimate benefit: the confidence to manage and evolve your infrastructure safely, without the messiness and toil of the past.

Why formae?

• The single source of truth is code: It unifies every infrastructure resource and change into fully versioned infrastructure code.
• Always up-to-date infrastructure code: It sees when things change outside the tool. It merges these changes into your infrastructure code instead of just ignoring or undoing them. This way, important outside changes are never lost, and are immediately incorporated into the infrastructure code.
• Prevents avoidable mistakes: It is built around a very robust, enforced schema.
• Made for everyone: It welcomes all kinds of engineers, whether they are new or experienced, be they in Ops, DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering.
• Perfect for Platform Engineering: It allows platform engineers to work at the low level of detail, while developers consume reusable services by just providing a few predefined, schema-safe properties.
• Built for co-existence: It is not necessary to migrate or import anything - formae will automatically discover and update resources and happily co-exist with other IaC and Infrastructure Management tools, and even ClickOps.
• Perfect for Day 0 and onward: It is equally great for setting up new systems and for making small, safe changes with minimal blast radius as you go.

How to Use formae in Your Organization?

Using formae is straightforward and designed to fit various team roles, needs and daily operation scenarios and situations:

• Core Platform Engineers: A small group of engineers with broad responsibilities can manage the main infrastructure code. They can make large, system-wide changes. They often use GitOps (managing infrastructure through Git), but formae doesn't enforce this.

• Engineers with Specific Roles & Developers: Engineers who are newer, or those who focus on smaller parts of the system, can make small changes. Developers needing to adjust specific resources can also apply these small patches. This keeps the risk of impact (blast radius) very small.

• On-Call Engineers (Emergency Fixes): An engineer fixing an urgent issue, even at night, works like those making small changes. No matter their experience, they focus on fixing the problem with minimal risk to other parts of the system. This helps them solve issues quickly and safely.

• Specialized Teams (Security, Cost Optimization): Teams that work across different areas, like security or cost-saving groups, can also apply changes as patches. They might not change the core infrastructure, but their changes can affect many parts of the system. formae handles these wider-reaching but targeted changes easily.

• Working with Other Tools: In many companies, people use different tools to make changes directly in cloud accounts. These could be special security tools or other IaC tools like Terraform, or even ClickOps. formae works well alongside them. It detects these external changes and merges them, giving you a consistent, version-controlled and always up-to-date view of your entire infrastructure - entirely as code.