formae

Overview

formae is an open-source Infrastructure-as-Code platform from New York-based Platform Engineering Labs, announced on October 22, 2025. It is positioned as a rethink of the IaC model pioneered by Terraform, with the central idea that the live state of your infrastructure, rather than a separate state file, should be the source of truth.

How It Works

formae operates in two modes: a reconcile mode that aligns your desired environment with production reality, and a patch mode that applies incremental changes. It automatically discovers and maps running resources across a cloud estate, regardless of whether they were created by Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, manual console operations, or legacy scripts. Its agent-based architecture decouples state management from clients, and configuration is written in PKL, the configuration language originally developed by Apple.

Open Source and Licensing

The project is published under a Functional Source License and is available on GitHub, with community discussion happening on Discord. That makes it free to adopt, though the Functional Source License is a source-available license rather than a standard OSI-approved open-source license, which some teams will want to evaluate before committing.

Who It's For

formae appeals to platform engineers frustrated by state-file drift and by infrastructure that was created outside of code. Its automatic discovery is the standout differentiator. The main trade-offs are maturity and the choice of PKL over HCL, so it is best suited to teams willing to bet on a new approach rather than those who need the deep community support and ecosystem of established tools.