Understanding Quali Torque: Buyer’s guide on who uses it, and why

So you’re interested in Quali’s Torque platform, but you need a little more information before making a decision.

We put together this buyer’s guide to provide an in-depth introduction to the platform and help you understand the benefits our users experience.

First, what is Quali Torque?

Torque is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that accelerates and optimizes the delivery of cloud infrastructure, from Day 0 through Day 2 of the lifecycle.

Torque simplifies the creation, deployment, and management of stateful cloud environments supporting use cases that include software development, demos, training, proof-of-concept deployments (POCs), ML Operations, and Agentic AI.

To accomplish this, the platform’s core capabilities include:

• Automated generation of IaC modules for infrastructure discovered via cloud accounts: Reusability is a foundational concept of Torque. To help improve reusability, Torque connects to the user’s AWS and Microsoft Azure accounts, discovers all services deployed via those accounts, and automatically generates open-source Terraform Infrastructure as Code files defining the state of those resources. These can be downloaded, added to a repository, and managed via the user’s Torque account.
• Discovery of IaC and other resources in the user’s git repositories: Torque connects to the user’s repositories and discovers the user’s IaC files and other resources. Torque then creates duplicate versions of these resources and normalizes them in YAML format so they can be orchestrated together to support the user’s unique environments. Combined with the ability to codify resources discovered from the user’s cloud accounts, this eliminates the need to create new infrastructure automation assets just to take advantage of Torque.
• AI-generated templates for environments: Known as “blueprints,” these templates leverage the user’s existing cloud resource configurations to define how all resources will be deployed to generate a live environment.
• Simple self-service catalog: Users can launch find and launch these environments via Torque’s native catalog in just a few clicks, thereby removing the complexity of provisioning cloud infrastructure and environments.
• Cloud governance: Role-based access controls dictate who can build or modify environment templates and who can simply launch them. Meanwhile, Torque handles all cloud security authentication so our customers can democratize access to launch cloud resources without distributing security credentials. And with native cloud governance policies and custom workflows, Torque administrators can ensure all resources deployed align with their standards.
• Day-2 Operations: Those with admin-level permissions can define complex actions for their cloud resources and environments as custom workflows in Torque. Users can execute them in a single click via Torque’s native UI, while admins can automate them based on custom schedules and in response to specific events. Meanwhile, admins can see all current activity—including resource deployments and actions performed on infrastructure—as well as review usage and performance trends in Torque’s activity dashboard.
• Cloud cost optimization: Torque monitors the resources and runtimes for everything deployed and tracks costs in its native dashboards. Torque’s ML-powered cost optimization tool automatically identifies when resources that users have deployed are sitting idle and calculates the potential savings of terminating those resources—providing administrators with insight into the biggest drivers of wasted costs.

What Problems Does It Solve?

The two main problems that Torque solves are:

• Velocity: Many organizations that have embraced the cloud are not moving as rapidly as they had expected
• Cost: Many organizations are still spending much more budget on the cloud than they hoped

Many organizations face “infrastructure sprawl” and management inefficiencies due to a flood of configuration requests, unmonitored usage, and ever-growing cloud costs.

Conventional methods using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools or cloud templates create bottlenecks and blind spots, compounding the issue by centralizing the deployment and management of infrastructure to the select few with the skills and security access to do so.

Torque addresses these challenges by leveraging the user’s existing cloud resources—including those defined via IaC or similar tools—and simplifying and streamlining the entire infrastructure management process.

We’ve seen some customers replace long-standing ticket-submission processes that took weeks to deliver with a single-click, self-service experience that deploys a workload in minutes.

Some of those same customers have used this approach to eliminate redundancies and idle resource deployments, resulting in millions of dollars in annual cloud cost savings.

Taken together, this approach can improve return-on-investment in complex cloud technologies.

Who Uses Quali Torque?

Specifically, the Torque platform is most often used among IT and DevOps teams that are overwhelmed by a constant pressure to fulfill a deluge of environment requests rapidly and efficiently.

Here are some of the common use cases that those teams leverage Torque to support:

• DevOps to scale cloud infrastructure: DevOps teams that rely on traditional IaC tools often struggle to work across large repositories to orchestrate the environments needed to support IT workloads or software pipelines. Torque connects to the repository—making it easier to provision those resources when needed—and allows the user to submit natural-language AI prompts to automatically generate reusable templates that can launch a cloud-based environment. Once live, DevOps teams can accelerate Day-2 operations with custom workflows, which can be executed in single click and automated so no one has to intervene manually. Torque monitors all environments, automatically notifies users about unexpected errors or configuration drift, and provides visibility so DevOps teams can understand who is using which resource and for what purpose at any given time.
• Platform engineering to simplify developer experience: In many cases, the developers and other users who need to run cloud infrastructure and environments lack the expertise in those tools to do so independently. This results in more tickets for the DevOps or IT staff who are skilled enough to complete this work, creating a bottleneck that slows the execution of all work that relies on those environments. Torque provides a simple catalog from which developers can find and launch the environments they need in just a few clicks—without the learning curve. This approach boosts productivity and makes life easier on both the DevOps engineer responsible for building environments and the developers who need to run them.
• Customer-facing software demo, training, & proof-of-concept environments: Those tasked with enabling and supporting customers rely on a diverse range of software environments to conduct demonstrations, training sessions, and other customer-facing work. These can be tedious to orchestrate and maintain, resulting in fewer customer engagements and heightened risk of performance issues due to infrastructure bugs or errors. Torque’s reusable environment templates eliminate the manual work to deliver these environments, while the self-service catalog enables customer-facing teams to run the environments they need on-demand.
• Optimizing AI models & ML apps: Ensuring AI models and applications leverage the most accurate and up-to-date resources can be complex and time-consuming—which can result in poor performance, accuracy, and wasted costs. IT and DevOps teams supporting data scientists and others who rely on AI apps have leveraged Torque to define the resources and automate the execution of critical tasks needed to maintain an AI application. This includes defining the cloud stack supporting the application itself (including cloud-based GPUs) and automating the execution of actions to maintain data quality, inference accuracy, and cloud cost optimization to cut down on the manual work needed to deliver these applications.

While these are some of the common use cases we see, they are not the only ones. Torque is flexible to support the resources needed to deliver applications of all kinds.

If you have a unique use case in mind, book a demo with our team to see if Torque is the right fit.

Why Should You Care?

Here are a few reasons that Torque could be valuable for you and your team:

If you’re tasked with provisioning infrastructure and/or orchestrating environments

Get Off the Hamster Wheel: Torque enables IT and DevOps teams to break free from firefighting mode by automating common and repeatable requests.

With a centralized service catalog, teams can ensure environments are reproducible, cost-transparent, and policy-compliant, reducing the manual workload and optimizing resource utilization.

Torque offers clear visibility into who is using which environments, how often, and at what cost.

If you’re in leadership and need to optimize how your teams operate

Elevate Infrastructure to the Business Level: By bringing infrastructure management closer to business needs, Torque creates a common language between the consumers (developers, business units) and the producers (IT and DevOps teams).

This alignment ensures that infrastructure is not just a technical resource but a strategic enabler of business goals. When IT and DevOps teams can manage infrastructure with the business context in mind—such as project priorities, cost constraints, or compliance requirements—it leads to more informed decision-making, better resource allocation, and faster time-to-market.

Torque bridges the gap between demand and delivery by providing self-service capabilities that empower users while maintaining control and governance, fostering a collaborative environment where both sides work towards shared business objectives.

How Does Torque Work?

For a look at this functionality in action, check out this introductory demo video on key Torque features:

Torque automates basic tasks and simplifies the user experience to make it easier to run cloud infrastructure faster and more efficiently.

To accomplish this, Torque creates the code needed to run environments, executes that code automatically (but within the user’s control and guardrails), monitors the performance of the resources deployed, and automates actions needed to optimize performance and efficiency.

The end goal is to treat all infrastructure—from even the most basic compute instance to the most complex environment supporting an AI Agent—as stateful, managed environments.

To help, we’ve mapped key features to the various stages of the cloud infrastructure lifecycle:

Day 0: Planning, design, configuration, and scripting

• IaC Generation via Cloud Discovery: Reusability is key to velocity in the cloud. Torque supports reusability by connecting to the user’s public cloud accounts, discovering the configurations for the services deployed via those accounts, and automatically generating open-source IaC files defining the state of the resources that the user selects. Users can download those files, add them to their git repositories, and leverage them to create environments in Torque.
• IaC Discovery via Git Repositories: In addition to creating new IaC modules, Torque connects to the user’s repositories, discovers the resources managed via those repositories, and normalizes them as interchangeable assets that can be used to define comprehensive cloud environment templates. Torque provides a comprehensive inventory detailing the resources discovered via the user’s repositories, making it easy to leverage and manage the resources they already have.
• AI Copilot to Create Environment as Code Blueprints: Users can simply submit natural-language AI prompts describing the environment they need and Torque’s AI Copilot will leverage the resource configurations discovered from their inventory to generate an Environment as Code blueprint. This process eliminates the orchestration of environments from the Day 1 stage of the lifecycle by defining environments as reusable blueprints that can be provisioned repeatedly and integrated into CI/CD platforms, developer tools, and other platforms.
• Visibility Into IaC Dependencies and Environment Activity: Torque shows how any IaC module is used in active environments, inactive environments, and blueprints managed by Torque—including the ability to filter by commits for individual modules. This allows users to understand how infrastructure is in use while designing the architecture supporting new projects.

Day 1: Deploying & integrating governed environments

• Automated deployment of routine infrastructure and environments: Since Torque manages environments as code, the platform can automate actions on that code. For infrastructure and environments supporting non-production workloads that are only needed during work hours, Torque automatically provisions those resources based on custom schedules set by administrators. This ensures routine environments needed for day-to-day tasks like development or demos are available as needed, eliminating the need for ticket requests as well as idle cloud resources during non-working hours.
• Democratized self-service provisioning for ad-hoc environments: Torque administrators can list environment blueprints on Torque’s self-service catalog, where developers and other users can find and provision them on-demand. Admins can set default values for details like parameters and tags so end users can simply click and deploy environments regardless of their expertise in IaC tools or cloud platforms.
• Centralized secrets management and custom role-based access controls: Unlike many popular IaC management tools, Torque’s provisioning experience removes security credentials from the process. Torque manages credentials and other secrets centrally so end users can simply click and launch infrastructure and environments without needing access to credentials. This allows administrators to distribute self-service cloud access while strengthening security.
• Integration and management for infrastructure supporting CI/CD pipelines: Torque’s Environment as Code blueprints can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines. This provides visibility, automation, and governance so users can run infrastructure and environments within their pipelines while also correcting errors and configuration drift proactively.
• Collaboration to prevent redundant infrastructure deployments: Redundant deployment of infrastructure adds unnecessary work to your engineering teams and inflates the cloud bill. Torque environments are shareable among users, eliminating the need to run identical environments concurrently. Similarly, Torque users can share access to leverage live infrastructure to support unique workloads. For example, administrators can deploy a single Kubernetes cluster which end users can access to support their unique environments. This eliminates the time spent to build infrastructure at scale as well as the unnecessary cloud costs for identical workloads.
• Cloud policy enforcement and approvals workflows: Torque administrators can define custom policies, as well as discover and leverage their existing policy files, to govern how infrastructure is run among their teams. Torque automatically enforces these policies by denying the provisioning of any resource that violates them, including the ability to trigger automated approvals for these violations. This provides security, FinOps, and engineering leadership teams assurance that no one is deploying infrastructure that increases risk.
• Automated tagging for resource deployments: Cloud tagging is critical for accurate reporting on costs and usage but can be difficult to enforce as a manual step in the configuration and provisioning process. Torque automatically applies default tags to resources deployed via the platform and provides a picklist from which users can select other tags set by an administrator. This helps to eliminate missing and inconsistent tags without requiring a change in behavior from developers or other end users who need to run environments.

Day 2: Automating routine actions and providing visibility to streamline ad hoc updates

• Defining & Automating Routine Day-2 Actions as Code: For frequent actions on live infrastructure and environments, such as backups or security patches, Torque workflows can define the action as code and automatically execute them based on triggers set by an administrator. These triggers can include recurring schedules (e.g. once per day or week) and events (such as environment conditions or even other actions). This can eliminate a significant amount of redundant day-to-day work that takes up valuable bandwidth for DevOps and other engineers responsible for maintaining infrastructure.
• One-Click Execution for Ad-Hoc Actions: In cases when engineers need to execute these actions outside of their automation schedule, Torque provides access to find and initiate the action in a single click via its native UI.
• Mapping IaC Resources to Live Environments: Since Torque discovers and manages the IaC modules in the user’s repositories, the platform can show how those resources are in use among active, inactive, and blueprints for environments. This enables users to anticipate the potential impact before pushing updates to infrastructure code.
• Dynamic Resource Scaling for AI Workloads: AI models and ML applications require regular updates, such as training and inference, that require varying amounts of compute capacity. Torque monitors the state of an AI workload continuously and automatically scales GPU allocation to support these updates adequately while also preventing costly over-provisioning for less resource-intensive phases.
• Automated Retry for Failed Terraform Commands: After recognizing that basic errors causing failed Terraform Commands are often corrected after retrying the command, our product team updated Torque to automatically retry when the platform encounters those specific errors. This improves reliability for infrastructure and environments while also reducing the effort needed to correct errors.
• Notifications About Configuration Drift, Errors, and Other Updates: Torque automatically notifies users when an error occurs, configurations drift from their intended state, and unexpected updates are pushed to infrastructure in an environment they own. This helps to ensure uptime by reducing time spent de-bugging infrastructure and environments.
• Tracking Activity on Live Infrastructure by User: Torque’s Operation Hub shows all activity on infrastructure and environments, including a live view into active environments and any actions performed on those environments. This view includes the users who performed this activity, so any other users knows who to contact with questions.
• Automated Recommendations for Cloud Cost Savings: Torque monitors all resources deployed via the platform and identifies those that are unused. The Inactivity Report shows all idle resources along with estimated cost savings for terminating them so users can review and act on opportunities to eliminate waste.
• Cloud Cost Tracking by Team, User, Pipeline, and Other Aspects: Unlike FinOps platforms, Torque tracks cloud costs based on the resources deployed and the runtimes set via the platform. This provides up-to-the-day cloud cost data that can be tracked by the users responsible for that activity as well as the teams, pipelines, cloud accounts, and other context needed to make informed decisions.
• Activity Tracking to Understand Resource Performance and Usage: Torque’s Activity dashboard also shows all resource usage over time so users can identify those with frequent errors and other valuable insights needed to ensure the team has access to reliable infrastructure continuously.

What Makes Quali Torque Unique?

Torque goes beyond traditional Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools and cloud templates. It offers a centralized and governed service catalog that enables seamless automation and orchestration of infrastructure provisioning.

With Torque, IT and DevOps teams can efficiently manage environments without getting stuck in repetitive tasks, gaining full visibility into cloud usage and costs, and ensuring environments are always compliant and optimized.

How Can I Justify Adopting Torque?

Last year, a software organization used Torque to convert their non-production workloads into managed environments.

After generating reusable environment blueprints for these workloads, Torque showed that each one had been running 24/7—even though most of them were not necessary outside of standard working hours, when developers didn’t use them.

By using Torque to align the runtimes of these environments with normal work hours, this customer eliminated enough wasted cloud cost to achieve 10x ROI on the licensing costs of their Torque account.

That value doesn’t take into account the time savings by automating the creation and maintenance of environments.

Here are some of the results you can expect that will more than offset the level of investment in Torque:

1. Increase Productivity and Efficiency: Show how Torque delivers substantial time savings for IT and DevOps teams, allowing faster delivery of environments and enhancing agility and time-to-market for new applications or services. We’ve seen users transform environment orchestration processes that took 2 days of work into a one-click process that launched the environment in a matter of minutes.
2. Reduce Operational Costs: Highlight the potential for significant cost savings through automated decommissioning of unused resources and optimized usage patterns. Companies adopting a service catalog with Torque have seen up to an 80% reduction in cloud costs within a few months.
3. Provide Clear Business Value: Torque’s detailed reporting and analytics connect infrastructure usage to business priorities, demonstrating clear ROI and aiding financial planning and accountability.
4. Facilitate Governance and Compliance: Torque’s built-in governance features that automate policy enforcement, execute complex actions, and provide comprehensive audit trails, helping to reduce risks related to security and compliance.

What are Some Torque Success Stories?

Organizations across various industries are already reaping the benefits of adopting Torque.

Here are a few examples of how Torque is transforming infrastructure management:

• Leading Financial Institution Cuts Environment Setup & Provisioning Time by 90%: A major financial services company struggled with long wait times for environment provisioning due to manual processes. By implementing Torque’s service catalog, they reduced environment setup times by 90%, from days to just hours. This acceleration in provisioning improved developer productivity and sped up the deployment of new services, giving them a critical edge in a highly competitive market.
• Software Company Cuts 50% of Annual Cloud Costs by Implementing Ephemeral Environments for Non-Production Workloads: A software vendor used Torque to automate the creation of environment blueprints for non-production workloads. After using Torque to ensure these workloads only ran during standard work hours for the teams that needed them, this organization projected a 50% reduction in annual cloud costs—which amounted to millions of dollars added to their gross profits for the year.
• Tech Company Increases Deployment Velocity by 4x: A large technology firm integrated Torque into their existing CI/CD pipelines, allowing developers to provision test and production environments on-demand. This integration led to a fourfold increase in deployment velocity, reduced errors, and minimized delays. With Torque, the team was able to launch environments in minutes, cut down on approval processes, and maintain consistent configurations across multiple environments.
• Global Enterprise Reduces Cloud Costs by 80% in One Month: A multinational corporation adopted Torque to manage its cloud environments more effectively. Within the first few months, they achieved an 80% reduction in cloud costs by eliminating unused resources and optimizing usage patterns. The automation of common requests led to significant time savings, allowing the IT team to focus on strategic initiatives instead of firefighting.
• Healthcare Organization Achieves Full Compliance and Reduces Security Risks: A healthcare provider needed to meet strict compliance standards while managing their cloud infrastructure. By adopting Torque, they automated policy enforcement and auditing, reducing security risks and ensuring all environments met regulatory requirements. The organization also benefited from a 60% decrease in the time spent on manual compliance checks, freeing up resources for more strategic tasks.
• Retail Giant Saves Over $500K in Annual Cloud Costs: A leading retail company used Torque to gain visibility into its cloud usage and optimize resource allocation. By automatically shutting down idle resources and rightsizing environments, they saved over $500,000 in cloud costs annually. Additionally, Torque’s analytics helped them align infrastructure usage with business priorities, driving further cost savings and efficiency gains.

These examples demonstrate how Torque can deliver significant operational savings, enhance productivity, ensure compliance, and align infrastructure management with business goals, all while simplifying the overall management of cloud environments.

How Can I Get Started with Torque?

To quickly realize the benefits of Torque, follow these steps:

1. Identify the Most Common Requests: Analyze your existing ticketing or request management system to identify the top 3-5 environment requests that are most frequent and critical to your operations.
2. Implement a Service Catalog: Use Torque to create a self-service catalog for these common requests. This allows users to provision environments themselves, reducing the number of incoming requests and freeing up IT and DevOps teams for higher-value work.
3. Roll Out, Monitor, and Optimize: Launch the service catalog internally, communicate its benefits to both technical and non-technical users, and provide training to drive adoption. Track the impact on request volume, response times, and cost savings, then refine and expand the catalog to include more services.

Start small by automating the most frequent tasks and see immediate benefits. With Torque, you can demonstrate value quickly, build internal support, and pave the way for broader adoption across your organization.

We do offer a 30-day free trial of Torque that includes unlimited enterprise functionality. To kickoff your trial today, submit this form.

You can also test-drive Torque functionality in the interactive Torque Playground. Without requiring an email address or credit card, the playground allows you to build, run, and modify actual cloud environments to understand how our users take advantage of the platform.

By embracing Torque, you ensure your infrastructure management strategy is not just efficient but also scalable and aligned with your business needs.