The rapid enterprise adoption of multicloud strategies has inadvertently created a complex and fragmented technological landscape, forcing engineering teams to grapple with disparate systems and operational friction. In response to this growing challenge, the open-source infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform formae, developed by Platform Engineering Labs Inc., has announced a significant expansion designed to unify and streamline the management of distributed cloud environments. The company has introduced beta support for several major public clouds, a strategic move that extends its capabilities far beyond its initial focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This development positions formae as a modern solution engineered to address the inherent complexities that legacy IaC tools, originally built for single-cloud architectures, have struggled to overcome. By providing a single, coherent system for discovering, codifying, and managing resources across providers, the platform aims to eliminate the manual, error-prone processes that currently hinder operational efficiency and scalability in today’s multicloud reality.
A New Paradigm for Infrastructure as Code
A fundamental challenge for organizations leveraging multiple cloud providers is the inadequacy of traditional IaC platforms, which were largely conceived in an era dominated by single-cloud architectures. Popular tools like HashiCorp’s Terraform, its competitor OpenTofu, and Pulumi often require engineering teams to manually “stitch together” integrations between different cloud environments. This approach results in fragile, brittle systems that are prone to outages and demand constant maintenance. A core issue with these established platforms is their reliance on state files, which track the condition of managed infrastructure. These files can become a significant operational burden, requiring what many engineers describe as “endless babysitting” to prevent drift, corruption, or conflicts, especially in complex, distributed systems. The inherent design of these tools was not optimized for the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of modern multicloud deployments, creating a persistent source of friction and risk for platform engineering teams striving for reliability and automation.
In stark contrast to the legacy approach, formae has been engineered from the ground up to natively handle multicloud complexity by fundamentally changing how infrastructure is discovered and managed. Upon installation, the platform automatically initiates a comprehensive discovery process, systematically scanning and codifying an organization’s entire cloud infrastructure. It meticulously maps every application, service, and resource, regardless of its location across different cloud providers, to generate a single, unified source of truth. This automated codification provides a holistic and consistently updated view of the entire technology estate, which serves as the foundation for all subsequent management and automation tasks. By creating this unified system, formae aims to accelerate the adoption of automation, provide a comprehensive system for tracking every resource and its changes over time, and ultimately eliminate the operational drag that has become synonymous with managing distributed infrastructure across multiple distinct cloud platforms.
Broadening Horizons with Multicloud Support
The latest update from Platform Engineering Labs marks a pivotal moment for the formae platform, officially adding beta support for a suite of major public cloud providers. This expansion now includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and OVHcloud. This move directly addresses the needs of modern enterprises that deliberately utilize multiple cloud vendors to optimize cost, performance, and resiliency. By extending its reach beyond its original AWS-centric framework, formae now enables companies to standardize their cloud infrastructure management practices under a single, cohesive platform. This unification is critical for reducing the cognitive load on engineering teams, who no longer need to master multiple toolsets and workflows for different environments. The ultimate goal is to drive significant improvements in operational efficiency, enhance security posture through consistent policy enforcement, and provide leadership with a clear, consolidated view of their entire cloud investment without the typical complexities.
Accompanying the new multicloud capabilities is the launch of a powerful new toolkit called the “Platform for Infrastructure Builders.” This software development kit (SDK) is specifically designed to solve a persistent and challenging problem in the IaC space: extending a platform’s capabilities to support additional technologies, such as proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) or other specialized internal tools. In ecosystems like Terraform, creating such custom extensions, known as providers, can be a complex and time-consuming endeavor, reportedly taking weeks of specialized development effort. In contrast, formae’s SDK leverages schema safety and a streamlined, plugin-based interface to radically simplify this process. The company asserts that this modern approach empowers teams to build operationally safe and reliable plugins in just a few hours, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for customizing and extending the platform to fit the unique needs of any organization’s technology stack.
Accelerating Innovation from Within
Zachary Schneider, the company’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, emphasized that this release is about more than just adding support for new clouds; it represents a fundamental shift toward enabling rapid customization within the IaC space. According to Schneider, the new SDK empowers engineers to leverage AI agents to quickly generate and modify plugins. Because these plugins are built within a framework that enforces schema safety and operational best practices, they are inherently more reliable and less prone to causing unintended side effects. This capability to safely and swiftly extend the platform’s core functionality is a significant differentiator, allowing organizations to integrate formae deeply into their existing workflows and toolchains without undertaking massive development projects. The fusion of an extensible architecture with AI-assisted development positions the platform not just as a tool for managing infrastructure but as a dynamic ecosystem that can evolve in lockstep with an organization’s changing technological needs.
The most compelling proof point for the platform’s efficiency and power came from the development process for the new multicloud support itself. Schneider revealed that their small team of only four engineers successfully delivered support for the four major new cloud providers by “eating our own dogfood,” a term for using one’s own product to achieve a business outcome. This accomplishment served as an internal validation of the “Platform for Infrastructure Builders” SDK and the core design principles of formae. Instead of spending months building out each integration manually, the team leveraged their own tooling to rapidly create the necessary plugins, demonstrating in a real-world scenario the speed and agility the platform was designed to provide. This milestone was not just a product launch but a powerful demonstration of the platform’s ability to solve the very problems it was built to address, solidifying its potential to dramatically simplify infrastructure management at scale.
