Morpheus Data Alternatives for Scaling Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Traditional cloud management platforms (CMPs) like Morpheus Data we’re designed to help infrastructure engineers provision traditional infrastructure.

Today’s development and engineering teams face a range of more complex challenges than just provisioning traditional infrastructure, such as the design and orchestration of environments, governance to ensure all resources provisioned are built and configured correctly, and the ongoing maintenance of both live infrastructure and the automation assets that define those assets.

As a result, the traditional CMP approach turns skilled infrastructure engineers into an operational bottleneck as the teams who rely on them are forced to wait for the delivery of environments and updates to ensure those environments are built correctly.

Morpheus Data customers have embraced Quali Torque to accelerate the comprehensive lifecycle of building, delivering, and managing infrastructure and environments of all kinds. This includes:

• Automation and AI support to accelerate the creation of code: Torque automatically creates Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules, leverages the user’s existing repositories of IaC and other resources, and provides an AI Copilot to generate reusable Environment as Code blueprints. This lowers the skills barrier and accelerates the creation of both infrastructure automation assets and environments at scale.
• Streamlined provisioning and access: Torque automates the provisioning and termination of routine environments based on custom schedules, provides an intuitive self-service provisioning experience that enables anyone to simply click to launch any environment on-demand, and integrates environments into CI/CD platforms and other tools to make environments seamlessly available where they’re needed.
• Cloud governance policies as code: Torque creates and enforces custom policies to automatically deny and/or require approval to provision infrastructure resources that violate custom standards for performance, security, and cloud costs.
• Continuous monitoring of live environments: Torque monitors the state of all live infrastructure, notifies users about provisioning errors or configuration drift, and provides visibility so administrators can understand which users performed any activity on their infrastructure.
• Automated actions on live infrastructure: Torque allows users to define complex actions for infrastructure that can be executed automatically based on events (e.g. the state or action on an environment), recurring schedules, and initiated manually in a single click.
• Cloud cost optimization: Torque recognizes when deployed resources are going unused and calculates estimated cloud costs of those resources so users can evaluate and terminate resources that drive up wasted costs proactively.
• User-centric reporting: Torque’s dashboards show the performance, activity, and cloud costs for all infrastructure deployed via the platform, including not only reports by cloud platform or resources, but also the teams and users responsible for running them.

For an in-depth look at how Morpheus Data users can migrate to Quali, book a demo with our team today. 

As opposed to the Morpheus Data platform, Quali’s tools encrypt all cloud account credentials and other secrets natively, then executes the authentication in the backend when users launch a resource or environment.

This eliminates the need to require security authentication or groups as part of the deployment process.

As a result, users can democratize access to provision infrastructure and environments without sharing cloud security credentials.

Torque monitors the state of all resources, tracks how these resources are used, and streamlines the execution of complex actions on live infrastructure.

This includes:

• IaC mapping: Since Torque connects to the repositories where users manage IaC, the platform can show how any IaC modules are in use among actively deployed environments, recently terminated environments, and the blueprints defining those environments. This allows users to understand the potential impact before pushing updates to infrastructure code.
• Real-time activity tracking: Torque’s Operation Hub shows all resources deployed and actions performed on those resources so infrastructure teams can see who is using which resource and drill down into the configurations and performance of those resources on-demand.
• Execution of Day 2 actions: Torque Workflows define actions as code and enable administrators to automate execution based on custom schedules, in response to specific events, and on-demand via a single click in Torque’s native UI. This accelerates the execution of routine activity that needs to be performed frequently so infrastructure engineers can spend more time on strategic activities.

Traditional CMPs like Morpheus Data lack native support for continuous monitoring and Day 2 activities, which can slow down infrastructure teams and hold back velocity for the provisioning tasks that they do support.

See how Torque supports Day 2 operations with this demo video.

Yes! Quali’s products support AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware, and other cloud platforms.

Since Quali creates templates defining all application infrastructure needed to support an application, the platform makes it easier to orchestrate environments with resources delivered via different cloud platforms.

Quali Torque’s reporting also makes it easy to understand activity and cloud costs across cloud platforms. Since Torque initiates the provisioning of all infrastructure, the platform can show which cloud resources, accounts, and platforms have been used and calculate the costs associated with that usage.

Cloud governance is essential to a platform that democratizes cloud access.

Of course, Quali’s tools enforce role-based permissions. This allows administrators to give access to those who just need to launch environments without granting them the freedom to configure and build environments.

To enforce governance over the creation of cloud resources, Quali uses policies. These can be custom-created (though Quali Torque comes with a number of out-of-the-box examples that admins can customize and enable) and activated to deny activity unapproved activity automatically.

For example, a policy to prohibit public cloud storage buckets automatically denies the launch of any resource configured that way until the user sets the storage to private. For a more advanced example, administrators can create a policy for maximum expected cloud costs. If the resource or environment exceeds that limit (regardless of the reason for the cost), Torque will deny the launch.

Only admins can created policies, and they can choose to enforce policies for all users in their Torque account or limit the scope to those with access via specific Spaces (which is how user access is managed).

Additionally, admins can require approval for specific policies. This allows admins to approve ad-hoc exceptions to policies in a single click, eliminating the need to recreate blueprints or re-configure cloud resources just for a one-off use case.

Learn more about cloud governance here.

Quali Torque is not a FinOps tool, but provides tools to track and optimize operational cloud costs.

Quali Torque initiates the deployment of cloud services, which allows the platform to manage the resources deployed and the runtime for the environment. For every deployment, Torque enforces a maximum duration, with the ability to set an environment as “Always On”–as long as admins allow it.

Based on this data, Torque can calculate the cloud costs for each resource and understand the cost of an application environment.

This allows the platform to prevent wasted cloud costs proactively. For example, Torque can prevents over-sized and otherwise costly cloud activity by enforcing custom policies. Admins can set policies on prohibited instance sizes, maximum runtimes, and maximum expected costs. If any attempted deployment violates those policies, Torque will deny the launch and require the user to correct it before they can run their application infrastructure.

The platform also monitors all active resources for inactivity and flags those that are not being used. Administrators can review and act on those savings opportunities to eliminate unnecessary cloud costs without disrupting operations.

Through these measures, Quali customers have reduced cloud costs by as much as 50%.

Watch this brief demo to learn more.