Infrastructure-as-code startup Platform Engineering Labs Inc. today announced a big update to its open-source formae platform, adding beta support for four new public clouds as it looks to expand its influence beyond Amazon Web Services environments.

Platform Engineering Labs debuted formae in October, saying it’s trying to modernize the IaC world. That refers to the practice of managing and provisioning information technology infrastructure such as compute and storage resources using machine-readable definition files. IaC eliminates the need for cloud platform engineers to spend hours manually adjusting all kinds of settings in their cloud environments, providing a way to automate the setup of servers, networks and other resources, and dramatically speed up application deployment times.

IaC is not a new concept, but existing platforms such as HashiCorp’s Terraform, its open-source rival OpenTofu and alternatives such as Pulumi Corp. are generally designed for single cloud environments rather than the reality of distributed clouds that almost all large enterprises live in today. Because of this, engineering teams are forced to spend time stitching together integrations and fixing outages that result from multicloud complexity.

With formae, Platform Engineering aims to solve this. Whereas existing IaC tools rely on brittle state files and require endless babysitting, formae accelerates automation. When installed, it sets about discovering and codifying an organization’s entire cloud environment, covering every application and service, no matter where it lives, creating a single source of unified truth. It tracks every resource and every change to the underlying code.

By adding support for Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure and OVHcloud, formae can now help companies to unify their cloud infrastructure management practices and eliminate the operational complexity that’s associated with multicloud strategies, the company said.

The expansion comes along with the launch of a new toolkit called the “Platform for Infrastructure Builders,” which aims to tackle the challenge of extending IaC platforms to support additional technologies. With Terraform, companies often have to spend weeks fiddling around to manage applications with IaC across different cloud platforms, but the new software development kit streamlines this process, leveraging formae’s schema safety and plugin-based interface.

Unlike other IaC platforms, formae’s architecture enforces explicit relationships and behavior, so teams can create operationally safe plugins for proprietary application programming interfaces or other tools in just a few hours.

Platform Engineering co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Zachary Schneider said today’s release opens IaC up for rapid customization. “Engineers can now use AI agents to quickly produce and modify plugins that are reliable by design,” he said. “By eating our own dogfood, we were able to deliver support for four major clouds with a team of just four engineers.”

Image: Platform Engineering Labs/Medium