formae now comes with k8s, Helm and .tfvars support, and a Public Hub for builders

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Another 3 months have passed since our last major release. Time flies when you keep shipping huge releases.

We definitely weren’t quiet in the meantime. We shipped automatically enforced policies such as TTL, improved reconciliation workflows, polished builders support, added MCP and Claude skills, and delivered many smaller improvements across the stack. But now it’s time for another big one.

And yes — before somebody asks — version 0.85.0 is a nerd joke. Internally we started referring to it as “o8s” — short for “Othernetes”. At some point it simply became the release nickname.

k8s support

formae now comes with a sophisticated and comprehensive schema and plugin for Kubernetes. Not only vanilla k8s, but also EKS, AKS and other major cloud flavours are covered. That is what organizations actually run in production. Supporting “generic Kubernetes” is one thing. Supporting the messy reality around it is even harder. We took care of the hard bits, so it’s simple for you.

What mattered to us was not just “adding Kubernetes support”, but making Kubernetes work the formae way. That means discovery, synchronization of changes, extract/patch workflows, codification, late binding (res), automatic reconciliation and automatically enforced policies all work consistently with k8s resources.

Real-world systems stretch from low-level infrastructure all the way into workloads, and formae can now model and manage that flow consistently. And seeing k8s finally work the formae way — schema-safe, composable, abstraction-driven, and flexible — feels incredibly satisfying.

Native Helm chart support

As soon as our design partners started using the early versions of our k8s support, the first question came almost immediately:

“Cool. But we already use Helm everywhere. Can formae work with that?”

Now the answer is simply: yes 🙂

You can use existing Helm charts directly from formae, natively inside your formae Pkl. No YAML gymnastics, no strange wrappers, no switching back and forth between worlds. Your infrastructure code stays schema-safe and uniform while still letting you consume the massive existing Helm ecosystem.

Helm is part of the operational reality of modern infrastructure. We wanted formae to work naturally with that ecosystem while bringing the consistency and abstractions of the formae model on top.

Native .tfvars support

Our users come from very different environments, but we kept hearing one recurring theme from almost everyone:

“The thing I really care about is my existing configuration.”

Not necessarily the declaration syntax itself. Not ideological attachment to Terraform or OpenTofu. The actual operational knowledge encoded in configuration values accumulated over years. So we opened that door.

formae can now consume native .tfvars directly. You can use multiple .tfvars sources inside the same formae Pkl if you want, and access everything naturally from Pkl without awkward conversions. This makes coexistence with Terraform and OpenTofu dramatically easier and allows teams to migrate at their own speed instead of forcing rewrite-first adoption strategies.

Existing infrastructure does not become legacy overnight, and migration paths should reflect that reality. That is a much more realistic way for infrastructure evolution to happen.

Finally: the Public Hub is live

Ever since we opened formae for builders a few months ago, we kept noticing the same thing over and over again: people were independently building the same kinds of plugins. That is usually a very strong signal that an ecosystem wants to exist. The absolute champion was Proxmox 🙂

That was the moment it became obvious that the ecosystem needed a dedicated home. A place where users can discover OSS plugins, and where builders can publish and maintain them properly.

Now that exists: https://hub.platform.engineering

The Public Hub is the home for formae OSS plugins. And we didn’t stop at simply hosting plugin metadata. We also take care of building and publishing plugins directly from builders’ repositories, which makes the entire experience a lot smoother for plugin authors.

We have already added all our official OSS plugins to the hub, and overall plugin installation and management is now significantly cleaner and easier than before.

Why all this matters

k8s and Helm support close one of the biggest remaining gaps for teams operating modern infrastructure and using formae. .tfvars support makes migration from Terraform and OpenTofu incremental and frictionless. And the Public Hub is the next step of community growth.

Taken together, this release makes formae feel much closer to the platform we originally imagined when we started building it.

What’s next

We are moving fast now.

The roadmap still stretches very far, and we are already working on the next wave of features and integrations. Some of them are extremely practical. Some of them are honestly just very cool.

Stay tuned.

Public Hub: https://hub.platform.engineering k8s plugin docs: https://docs.formae.io/en/latest/plugins/containers/k8s/ Helm integration docs: https://docs.formae.io/en/latest/plugins/containers/k8s/helm/ .tfvars integration docs: https://docs.formae.io/en/latest/integrations/tfvars/ formae Quick Start: https://docs.formae.io/en/latest/ GitHub: https://github.com/platform-engineering-labs/formae Community (Discord): https://discord.com/invite/hr6dHaW76k