We’ve all witnessed the exponential growth of cloud technologies and the emergence of platform engineering as a critical discipline.

Platform engineering focuses on creating self-service solutions – often in the form of an internal developer platform or internal developer portal – that simplify and enhance software delivery and operational workflows. It’s about creating an integrated platform that abstracts the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, enabling developers to focus on delivering value rather than wrestling with operational hurdles.

Learn More: Internal Developer Platform vs Internal Developer Portal: What’s the Difference?

Key challenges for modern platform engineering teams

Managing modern cloud environments is akin to navigating a labyrinth. The complexities of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud setups present significant challenges, especially when coordinating resources across different tools and configurations.

Each cloud provider comes with its own set of services, APIs, and best practices, making it difficult for a platform engineering team to maintain consistency. We also often rely on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, Helm, and Ansible for infrastructure provisioning and configuration management supporting software development pipelines.

However, reconciling dependencies across these tools and providers to ensure they work harmoniously can be daunting without a unified control plane.

Why platform engineering matters

So, why is platform engineering so valuable in today’s context? Here are some compelling reasons:

• Improved developer productivity: Creating a developer experience that enables developers to focus on coding and delivering features via self-service capabilities and simplified infrastructure management.
• Accelerated delivery: Streamlined workflows reduce deployment times, enabling faster time-to-market.
• Operational alignment: Aligning development and operations makes sure that your applications and the infrastructure behind them move in lockstep.
• Enhanced governance: Centralized control ensures compliance with organizational policies and standards.

Key platform engineering tools for 2025

Quali Torque integrates with some of the most prominent platform engineering tools in the industry to enhance their capabilities. Below we review each one, discussing their strengths and shortcomings.

Spotify Backstage

Spotify Backstage enables a platform team to create a custom internal developer portal. By bringing together infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation into a centralized hub, this open-source tool has become the de facto standard for any platform team looking to implement an internal developer portal.

Common challenges for platform teams responsible for delivering an internal developer portal built on Backstage include a complex initial setup and significant maintenance overhead, which may diminish some of the productivity benefits.

Jenkins

Jenkins leverages automation to accelerate the building, testing, and deployment of code supporting software development pipelines, yielding faster delivery times and higher code quality. This open-source automation server is incredibly popular in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

JFrog Artifactory

As you develop software, the artifacts generated need to be organized and stored. JFrog Artifactory does just this. With compatibility for a wide array of package formats, this repository seamlessly integrates with CI/CD tools to simplify and optimize artifact management throughout the software development lifecycle.

GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket

These popular version control and collaboration platforms host code repositories. They provide features for issue tracking, code review, and project management, all of which enhance collaboration in software development.

Terraform & OpenTofu

Terraform is the de facto standard for Infrastructure as Code tools, employing a declarative configuration language for users to define and provision infrastructure resources according to the desired state. This delivers consistent and automated infrastructure provisioning for multi-cloud environments. OpenTofu is an alternative that provides similar functionalities with community-driven development.

Ansible

Open-source Ansible uses a straightforward, human-readable language for configuration management. The automation engine makes it easier to manage and scale your infrastructure efficiently.

Helm on Kubernetes

By leveraging “charts,” packages that contain pre-configured Kubernetes resources, Kubernetes-native Helm simplifies Kubernetes applications. It makes defining, installing, and upgrading even complex K8s apps a snap.

The following table summarizes the strengths and shortcomings of each tool above.

Quali Torque: A control plane for platform engineering tools

Quali Torque acts as an internal developer platform for managing the lifecycle of complex cloud infrastructure, including via integrations with internal developer portals built on Spotify Backstage.

Torque’s support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure, as well as its ability to leverage the user’s existing Infrastructure as Code and Kubernetes tools, simplify infrastructure management across multiple cloud providers and DevOps automation tools.

The following is a list of Quali Torque’s critical features for platform engineering.

Automatic creation of Infrastructure as Code files

Torque can automatically generate IaC modules directly from your existing cloud resources. It supports state management for cloud environments, ensuring your infrastructure configurations are always up-to-date and consistent.

Orchestration of pre-existing resources

The platform discovers and normalizes pre-existing resources in the user’s Git repositories to enable interchangeability and integrations among IaC files, Helm Charts, Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD pipelines, and any other resource needed to build and access an environment. By encapsulating complex configurations into these templates, you can standardize deployments and reduce errors.

AI-generated Environments as Code

Based on the resources discovered in the user’s repository, Torque automates the creation of Environment as Code blueprints, which can provision and manage the lifecycle of even the most complex environments. Using Torque’s AI Copilot, users can submit natural-language prompts describing the environment they need, and Torque will automatically compile the code from the user’s inventory of resources to all the dependencies and agents needed to generate the live environment. Those who create environments can choose to deploy them as soon as they’re done with design, and can distribute access to run them via Torque’s native catalog and integrations with internal developer portals.

Self-service catalog

Torque’s self-service catalog functions as an internal developer portal that enables one-click provisioning of both infrastructure as code and Environments as Code. This means developers can access pre-configured infrastructure without waiting on operations teams, accelerating the development lifecycle.

Day-2 operations automation

Torque automates cloud governance, cloud cost optimization, and compliance tasks related to deployed environments; this includes any scaling, updating, and monitoring required, meaning the development team is free to focus on innovation.

How Quali Torque supports platform engineering teams

So what exactly does Quali Torque bring to the table? It enables platform engineering teams to fully leverage the above tools.

Improved productivity and efficiency

Torque lets developers and operations teams turn to more strategic projects. Plus, automating repetitive processes like environment provisioning and configuration results in fewer human errors and faster delivery timelines.

Support for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud setups

Torque lets platform engineering teams manage infrastructure across multiple cloud providers seamlessly. It abstracts the differences between cloud providers with a unified API and management console, while also supporting hybrid scenarios featuring workloads both on-premises and in the cloud.

Scalability and reusability for enterprises

Torque’s automation and orchestration features streamline large-scale deployments. Platform engineering teams can create reusable templates to standardize deployments across teams and projects. Torque also supports parameterization and versioning of templates, enhancing reusability.

Cloud cost optimization

With Quali Torque, platform engineering teams gain visibility into resource utilization, identify idle resources, and automate the shutdown of unused environments. All of this leads to better cloud cost control and lower spend.

Governance and compliance

Ensuring that all deployments adhere to compliance policies across your cloud environments is critical. Torque helps with this by enforcing policies through predefined templates and role-based access controls.

Conclusion

Platform engineering has become indispensable to staying competitive. Tools like Quali Torque empower teams to manage complex infrastructures efficiently, automate processes, and enforce governance.

By serving as a control plane for platform engineering tools, Torque enhances productivity, reduces costs, and ensures compliance across multi-cloud environments.

Ready to get started? Kick off a 30-day free trial of Torque today.