In 2024, when HPE announced its acquisition of Morpheus Data, many customers and partners in the community started to evaluate Morpheus Data alternatives.
Going forward, those who rely on Morpheus Data to provision infrastructure and hybrid cloud environments will face an uncertain future.
We created this article to help Morpheus Data users understand how Quali’s infrastructure automation and orchestration tools can help them navigate this transition.
Here’s how Torque delivers tangible benefits in infrastructure velocity and cost optimization when compared to Morpheus:
1. Lifecycle Management for Infrastructure & Environments
Similar to Morpheus Data, Quali’s Torque platform provisions infrastructure and environments.
Once deployed, however, Torque continuously monitors the state of all resources in those environments, notifies users about anomalies, and automatically executes Day 2 operations on live infrastructure. This includes:
- Pushing updates to live infrastructure code
- Aligning updates to environment blueprints with live environments
- Automatically correcting basic Terraform provisioning errors
- Providing AI insights to diagnose infrastructure errors
- Automatically executing routine Day 2 actions defined as Torque Workflows
- Triggering notifications about configuration drift and updates to live infrastructure
Morpheus, in contrast, focuses more heavily on Day-0 provisioning. Its lack of support for Day 2 operations requires users to resort to manual processes or external tools to manage post-deployment infrastructure tasks, which holds back velocity and increases tool sprawl.
To see how Torque supports Day 2 operations, watch this brief demo video:
2. AI-Supported Creation of IaC Files & Environment Blueprints
Torque automates the creation of reusable assets needed to build, run, and govern cloud infrastructure and environments.
This includes:
- Automated creation of open-source IaC files defining cloud resources discovered via the customer’s public cloud accounts
- Discovery of IaC modules, Configuration Management resources, and other assets in the user’s existing Git repositories, which are easily imported to be managed via the user’s Torque account
- AI-generated design and generation of Environment as Code blueprints based on user-submitted prompts and the resources generated and imported in the user’s Torque accounts
- AI-generated code defining cloud governance policies based on Open Policy Agent standards
For large teams with high demand of requests for infrastructure and environments, this accelerates the process of building standardized, version-controlled templates that are ready for deployment across development, staging, and production environments.
The AI-supported user experience also lowers the barrier, enabling more engineers to design environments and create executable code regardless of their expertise in IaC or other cloud technologies.
Comparatively, Morpheus Data and other CMPs require significant expertise and manual scripting to create cloud environments, thereby turning your skilled engineers into a bottleneck slowing down the pipelines and other work streams relying on them.
3. GitOps-Native Environments as Code
Torque Environment as Code blueprints accelerate GitOps workflows by integrating environment blueprints with Git repositories and CI/CD pipelines, and tools like ArgoCD.
This structure improves traceability, reduces onboarding time for developers, and ensures repeatability across environments.
Torque’s IaC-first approach, and ability to accelerate the creation of resources in support of a GitOps motion, enables users to get more the value from their GitOps workflows.
4. Customizable Policy-as-Code for Comprehensive Cloud Governance
Torque applies cloud governance at each stage of the infrastructure lifecycle.
While Torque’s custom role-based access controls ensure only admins can create and modify resources, policies also prevent the risk of misconfigurations or other violations at the administrator level.
Users can create custom policies, use Torque’s out-of-the-box policy code, and leverage Torque’s AI Copilot to auto-generate new policy code to instruct the platform to deny the deployment of any resource that violates their standards.
Some examples include:
- Allowed cloud platforms, regions, services, or instance sizes: Ensure each team is only able to deploy cloud infrastructure in line with standards set by IT.
- Maximum cost and runtime: Deny the deployment of any resource if it’s set to run too long or configured to exceed a custom cost threshold.
- Maximum concurrent environments: Prevent wasted cloud costs by requiring users to collaborate on live infrastructure and environments, as opposed to allowing multiple identical resources to run concurrently.
While Morpheus offers customizable RBAC and provisioning controls, its lack of support for full infrastructure lifecycle management falls short of full cloud governance.
Learn more about cloud governance via Torque with this brief demo video:
5. AI-generated cloud cost optimization recommendations
In addition to enforcing cloud cost policies, Torque also supports efficiency by recommending—and potentially acting on—opportunities to eliminate waste.
Using AI/ML, Torque identifies idle resources that users have deployed via the platform Users can review these idle resources using Torque’s native cloud cost dashboard, and can choose to
While Morpheus provides cost dashboards and policy enforcement capabilities, it lacks proactive automation. The burden of optimization remains on the user, making it harder to consistently realize savings.
6. SaaS-based simplicity & scale
Torque is delivered as a SaaS platform with a multi-tenant architecture, allowing fast onboarding and reduced operational overhead. Automatic updates, scalability, and built-in governance are delivered out-of-the-box.
Morpheus relies on an appliance-based deployment model. This requires more effort to install, maintain, and scale—which can slow down adoption, especially in globally distributed teams.
7. Strategic alignment with platform engineering trends
Torque is built with platform engineering in mind. Many users have relied on Torque to accelerate the integration of environments into their Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), such as those built using Spotify Backstage.
With native support for IaC, Kubernetes tools, and CI/CD platforms, Torque can make fully operational and continuously optimized environments a seamless part of the developer experience.
Traditional CMPs are designed to support VM-centric, ITSM-driven workflows. As more DevOps-centric organizations embrace cloud-native infrastructure, the ability to integrate and manage infrastructure and environments into that experience will become more valuable.
Conclusion
Organizations that prioritize infrastructure velocity and cost control will find that Torque offers structural advantages over Morpheus. From its SaaS delivery model to AI-based cost optimization and native GitOps support, Torque simplifies infrastructure management while empowering teams to move faster and operate more efficiently.
Rather than just enabling provisioning, Torque supports the full lifecycle of environments with the control, automation, and intelligence modern teams require.
To learn more, book a demo with our team.