Forma: The BaaS-killer

Forma is the way you’ve wished Enterprise Blockchain Infrastructure was.

In January, we released the BETA version of Forma — our Multi-cloud Remote Blockchain Infrastructure Orchestrator. Here we want to tell you more about it and what you can achieve by signing up today.

Since we released Forma, we have had tens of companies sign up to it, provide us invaluable feedback, but more importantly enable their own solutions for their own customers. From healthcare payments companies to supply chain and government institutions to IoT platforms.

Recommended read: A story of BaaS, blockchain infrastructure, and the future of federated networks

Unlike software as a service, Blockchain infrastructure is rather important and giving all the control away is far away from what companies want.

If you can blindly trust other parties to have your infrastructure and centralize it for the whole network, then a blockchain is not what you need.

We like to see Forma as the happy middle between doing things manually and getting locked-in to cloud providers.

In a “Blockchain as a Service” a cloud provider keeps all the infrastructure for every company. They make it quite easy to get started but what if you want the infrastructure on your premises, or if you’d like to use another cloud provider for the infrastructure?

In the end, companies get locked into their offerings, after all, that’s their business, to sell their infrastructure with value added services such as centralized Blockchain services.

On the other hand, Forma doesn’t centralize the infrastructure (as it connects remotely to your infrastructure) nor takes control away from the companies.

This enables a whole new world for the Enterprise Blockchain world:

• Networks can today be made of multi-cloud infrastructure.
• Components will be able to be migrated from one cloud provider to another — without lock-in.
• Companies don’t have to blindly trust a single party to keep everything for them (all the data). We don’t store it, therefore, don’t access it.

But also, it brings all the benefits that a Blockchain as a Service would:

• No company has to invest hundreds of hours setting up their infrastructure.
• Forma streamlines the tasks that require coordinated information from multiple companies, such as installing smart contracts.
• Onboarding new companies is easier than ever, making the network effects the center of the networks’ growth.

Forma is the Multi-Cloud Remote Blockchain Infrastructure Orchestrator.

Blockchain frameworks such as Hyperledger Fabric are really powerful and well designed, but they lack a good developer experience. Setting it up to a production level takes months, and that’s way harder when you have to include and coordinate multiple IT departments.

A lot of the critics to these frameworks focus on that specific point, something we address from the Open Source space (with Convector) to the Enterprise with Forma.

Even if some cloud providers have been saying for years now that they will provide multi-cloud capabilities we all know that that’s not historically common. And even if they tried, their “multi-cloud” features always end up with some taste of their cloud requiring specialization (take Kubernetes as an example).

While some promise to get it someday, we do it today, and not just semi-multi-cloud with some components replicated somewhere else, actual fully multi-cloud networks!

Don’t get us wrong, we have no problem with the big cloud providers, we even have partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Google. Our platform supports their infrastructure offerings and we love them! But we believe that Blockchain brings a paradigm change even for them. Lock-in is not an option.

We expect to support all major blockchain frameworks (Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Quorum) as well as all major cloud providers. Today we support already Hyperledger Fabric on Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and on-premise Kubernetes clusters.

Here’s a sneak peek on how it looks like to use Forma for your blockchain network:

Creating a network and managing multiple clusters from multiple cloud providers is now a matter of a few clicks.

We expect in production you use your own infrastructure however you can use our Fully Managed Service for your pilots and get started in literally minutes.

Forma will leave its BETA status in less than a month and enable you to create production-grade networks. During the BETA, memberships start at $150/mo/org becoming the most accessible option in the market (developer accounts include 2 organizations all for the same price).

Forma already has some killers features like:

• Containers self-repair if they are restarted for some reason by Kubernetes (like a cluster node failing). You never lose the state of the blockchain or your cryptographic components (or get containers that disappear!- yeah our customers usually come from other platforms that don’t work that well and they tell us 🙂).
• Each participant can choose their own cloud provider on their own cluster.
• We have smooth tutorials for each task that can be performed in Forma.
• Forma includes Tellus, our transaction designer to allow companies to spin up prototypes without coding the smart contract logic.

Cloud providers use you as a means to sell more infrastructure to other companies, by asking them to create an account into their platforms if they want to connect to your blockchain network. So, instead of getting used by them, use them as the means to architect and power the future of your industry in a decoupled and scalable setup with Forma.

Sign up today to get a 7-day trial