formae doesn't require its user to maintain any secondary artifacts such as state files, and keeps the infrastructure code automatically in sync with the reality.
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.
Last modified 02 November 2025