🎉Announcing the production release of Forma ☁️⛓🔓

The first remote fully multi-cloud infrastructure automation platform. Why automation, why Forma, and a new free tier.

A few weeks ago we released some stats on how enterprises were leveraging Forma for their blockchain networks and today we are excited to announce the general availability of Forma.

The trend is towards more specific use cases, iterative approaches, and the leadership of influential industry members such as Service Providers and Independent Software Vendors.

This release includes a group of exciting features along with some exciting plans:

• Full Hyperledger Fabric +1.4 support. Plans for this year to support Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, Corda, and Hyperledger Sawtooth.
• Support RAFT-based ordering service by default (we are the first provider to do so).
• APIs for every task you can do in the web console (great for CI/CD!).
• Add and remove organizations from existing networks and channels.
• Fully distributed infrastructure support for any major cloud provider or bare-metal Kubernetes.
• Preserve full confidentiality by keeping the data in your own clusters.

Read all the available features here.

The concept behind Forma is simple: automate blockchain infrastructure without centralizing it. Our approach decouples the blockchain layer from the computing infrastructure underneath it.

With our unique approach, we can achieve:

• ☁️ Real multi-cloud networks: every organization picks their preferred cloud vendor or on-premise setup.
• 🔏 Confidentiality and compliance: the data stays in your data center, we never host it (unless you choose to).
• 🤗 Freedom: you can migrate from a computing platform if you need to.
• 🤖 Automation and autonomous self-healing: 3 clicks to create a full-blown production network while proactive monitoring brings components up in case something fails.
• 🕔 Assured upgrades: new versions can be rolled out automatically.
• 🎛 Monitoring and alerts: automatic alerts for events on your infrastructure.

If you are ready to give it a try go ahead and create your account here!

Three key topics are covered in this blog post:

1. Why automation. What you would have to do without automation.
2. Why Forma. How automation is not enough, decentralization is key.
3. A brand new free tier. Startups startups startups!

Read more 👇

1. Why automation?

You may consider that managing the infrastructure with your DevOps department is the best way to keep control however creating your own scripts, managing the workflow of changes and on-boarding new members as well as removing them creates a whole new extra cost line that your network may not want to bear over time.

Before setting up the network you would need to consider the following:

• Where will the infrastructure run? In multiple cloud providers or a hybrid managed by multiple companies? What would be the necessary knowledge to install in every computing platform?
• The specific ledger knowledge to not only deploy but tune and apply security best practices.
• How to handle all the plumbing from disks all the way to networks?
• Do you have to build your own scripts or templates? Do these provide you sufficient granularity?
• How to coordinate tasks that require actions in multiple data centers?

Then consider what comes next after setting up the initial deployment:

• How are you going to handle the potential failure of the infrastructure? Recovery plans and backups?
• How to add new members or remove them?
• How to roll out ledger protocol updates and smart contract upgrades?
• How to monitor performance and apply changes in all the environments where the infrastructure runs?

The business case can be derived from these factors, we typically see around 90% savings when automating infrastructure management and orchestration.

2. Why Forma versus any other cloud service?

If you decide that automation is what you need, how can you pick the right offering?

Forma, unlike other options, was architected from the group up to support multiple independent environments (AWS, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, bare-metal Kubernetes) without us hosting your infrastructure.

You may find using templates from a cloud provider like AWS as an interesting option, however, consider how you may get stuck into that cloud offering and how you will manage the infrastructure that does not run in AWS, leaving aside all the points we already commented on the previous section.

Other cloud providers offer variants of that approach but still take days and quite some provider expertise to get it working.

Interested in learning why it’s better to use AWS as the computing layer and not the blockchain service? Read this quick blog post.

With Forma, you can still use any cloud provider you’d like but without getting locked into their offerings, orchestrating tasks across data centers, and automating the monitoring, upgrades, backups, and self-healing tasks that this kind of infrastructure requires. You get ease, multi-cloud, and no lock-in.

3. A brand new free tier

Forma’s developer environment is the most cost-effective way to get started. A 2 organizations network costs only $150/mo and covers all the infrastructure components (disks, computing, networks).

Although that offering is quite accessible we know as founders ourselves, that for some startups just getting started may still find it hard to set up such accounts when they are just starting pilots with their customers. So we have decided to offer a brand new free tier to companies with less than 3 years of existence and less than $10,000 MRR for 3 full months.

Request Your Free Tier Account Here! ☁️

Also, the 7-day free trial remains the same, accessible to anybody interested in automating their blockchain infrastructure. Request 7-day free trial here.

Are you ready to tackle a production-ready project? Request a quote here!