What is Quali Torque?

Profile

Quali Torque is a SaaS-based platform that simplifies and accelerates end-to-end cloud infrastructure operations, from Day 0 through Day 2 of the infrastructure lifecycle. DevOps, platform engineering, and other teams use Torque to accelerate productivity and optimize efficiency by automating redundant manual tasks, simplifying and democratizing provisioning, and providing continuous governance and visibility to optimize the operation of cloud infrastructure and environments. Torque’s features include the ability to create an easy-to-use inventory of reusable cloud assets; a simplified and governed self-service experience for creating and provisioning environments; and automation and visibility tools to ensure all infrastructure and environments are secure, compliant, and cost-efficient.

Focus

Torque’s primary objective is to simplify and accelerate the tasks required to deliver and maintain cloud environments. Torque’s foundation is its ability to create and manage Environment as Code blueprints, which use YAML to normalize cloud resource configurations to define, deploy, and manage complex environments for production and non-production workloads alike. This normalization allows users to leverage their existing infrastructure assets—whether defined as Terraform, Ansible, OpenTofu, Helm, native Kubernetes, or otherwise—to define complex environments as code, so they never need to build those environments again. With the Environment as Code blueprint model, Torque users can create, launch, and perform Day 2 actions on environments regardless of their expertise or skillset in complex infrastructure tooling. This helps to eliminate redundancies and bottlenecks, thereby improving efficiency for cloud infrastructure management. This approach has been used to support use cases ranging from the simple delivery of basic infrastructure like Virtual Machines to the delivery and maintenance of AI models at scale.

Background

Quali originally built Torque in 2021 to extend the value of the environment blueprint model from its CloudShell platform to cloud-native teams that rely on Infrastructure as Code and Kubernetes. This infrastructure control plane approach enables cloud-native teams to leverage their resources defined via IaC and Kubernetes to create ready-to-run Environment as Code blueprints faster and more easily. Torque’s functionality has since evolved to help users create the inventory of infrastructure assets that the platform can leverage, with its native tool enabling users to codify cloud resources discovered via their public cloud accounts into open-source Infrastructure as Code files. Torque has also grown to support Day 2 operations, cloud cost optimization, and integrations across the platform engineering and DevOps ecosystem, including Jenkins, Backstage, LocalStack, ServiceNow, OpenTofu, and others.

Quali Torque main features

Torque’s main features fall into three categories: Curate, Self-Service, and Operate.

In the Curate category, Torque creates and maintains an inventory of reusable cloud assets by discovering resources in the user’s Git repositories. Users can expand this inventory by discovering cloud services from AWS and Azure accounts, with Torque automatically generating open-source Infrastructure as Code files to define these resource configurations.

For Self-Service, Torque allows users to submit natural-language AI prompts describing how resources in their inventory should be orchestrated. Torque then defines the code and creates an Environment as Code file needed to provision the environment. Its native self-service catalog and integrations with ecosystem tools—including IDPs, CI/CD platforms, and developer tools—enable developers to deploy Infrastructure as Code and Environments as Code without requiring variables, security credentials, or other inputs. Collaboration tools allow sharing of live infrastructure and environment outputs to reduce redundant deployments, while admins can set policies and custom role-based access controls to ensure that all deployments adhere to standards for performance, security, compliance, and costs.

In the Operate category, Torque defines Day-2 actions as code, allowing users to execute them in a single click or set custom triggers to automate these actions when needed. Administrators can track all activity and cloud costs—including resource deployments, Day-2 actions, and environments using any IaC file in the inventory—to proactively identify and resolve errors or cost anomalies.