Your Cloud Environments, Just a Click Away

Quali’s Torque is intended to help you get more out of your Infrastructure as Code files.

After recognizing that our customers spent most of their time manually configuring multiple IaC and containerized assets into complete environments, we designed Torque to automate that process so they can spend their time more productively.

Torque leverages your Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, Kubernetes, and other assets directly from your Git repositories and allows users to define a ready-to-run environment based on those assets.

These environments are wrapped in YAML that makes them repeatable, so developers, testers, and other end users can deploy them as many times as needed. This also allows you to set policies and make updates centrally that will be reflected in the YAML every time your end users deploy the environment.

Think of Torque as a control plane that allows you to define and launch environments similarly to Infrastructure as Code, while also enforcing cloud governance and providing reports on activity and cloud costs by user and team.

Yes, we encourage it! Our most successful users automate the orchestration of complete environments that may contain multiple Terraform scripts, CloudFormation assets, Helm Charts, or Kubernetes manifests so they don’t have to do it manually.

Currently Torque leverages assets from Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Helm, Kubernetes, Quali CloudShell, and Ansible. If you have questions about a specific infrastructure automation tool, contact our team today.

Not exactly. Quali Torque leverages the code defined within Terraform modules (as well as those defined in other IaC and Kubernetes tools) to create new YAML files that can define complete environments.

Torque normalizes the infrastructure from the user’s IaC modules so they can create a YAML defining all the inputs, dependencies, infrastructure components, and outputs to launch an application environment–even if the infrastructure components were defined using different IaC tools.

Once defined, Torque users can initiate the creation of those environments with a single click, set a duration to automate termination when it’s no longer needed, and maintain the configurations for all future deployment via the central YAML file.

Since Torque manages the actions to execute the code in those definitions, the platform can also automate those actions based on daily schedules, enforce role-based permissions and governance policies to prevent unauthorized deployments, and track all activity and costs based on the user responsible for it.

In short, Torque accelerates the orchestration of application environments that leverage our customers’ IaC, while automating the monitoring and governance of how those environments are used.

Our users integrate Torque with their CI/CD platform to better manage their application infrastructure.

Security is one major benefit. Many teams have encountered developers sharing admin credentials for cloud accounts just to fulfill basic infrastructure needs, which creates widespread security risks. Torque encrypts admin credentials and automates the authentication behind the scenes. Our blueprint model allows developers and others to run cloud environment via self-service without needing or having access to credentials at all.

Cost is another priority for our users. Idle cloud resources, or those that your teams deploy without using or forget to terminate once they’re done with them, are one of the biggest sources of cloud waste. The same can be said for over-sized cloud resources, or those that are larger than the actual workload needs. Torque automatically prevents these sources of waste at scale. The platform identifies idle cloud resources and calculates the cost savings from terminating them. Meanwhile, admins can set workflows to automate the termination of cloud resources based on a daily schedule (for example, the end of the workday), and configure custom policies that instruct Torque to deny deployment of cloud resources that violate their cost standards, including those that are oversized or unnecessarily long runtimes.

Finally, productivity is a major benefit of leveraging Torque to run your application infrastructure. Torque leverages IaC to define the complete configuration of application environments–including those that require multiple resources defined in different IaC tools–that teams can deploy repeatedly and maintain continuously. These reusable definitions eliminate redundant orchestration processes, allow teams to collaborate on and maintain application infrastructure at scale, and continuously how your teams are using your cloud resources and budget.

No. Torque integrates with industry-leading CI/CD tools so our customers can automate the lifecycle of application environments directly within their pipelines.

Many of our customers rely on Torque to accelerate pipelines and maintain configurations by relying on Torque’s automation, governance, drift detection, and activity reporting.

Quali Torque is an orchestration and management platform that provides visibility into cost consumption and waste, as well as automation and governance to optimize costs.

Since Torque initiates the creation of cloud infrastructure, the platform calculates the costs of all deployments based on the configuration and runtime of each cloud resource. Our dashboards provide up-to-the-minute cost reporting based on those deployments.

Cost reports in Torque also provide for cloud activity, including the users or teams responsible for those deployments and the associated costs. This helps our users identify who is responsible for their biggest cost drivers more proactively.

Torque continuously reviews all actively deployed cloud resources to identify those that are idle. The Inactivity dashboard shows all inactive cloud resources that their teams have deployed, along with the expected cost savings of terminating those resources.

As the deployment layer for cloud infrastructure, Torque can also enforce rules to deny activity that wastes budget. For example, policies can instruct Torque to deny the launch of cloud resources that are oversized, scheduled to run too long, or expected to exceed a custom threshold for costs. Similarly, workflows allow admins to automate the termination of cloud resources at the end of the workday, thereby preventing idle resources running overnight or on weekends.

Learn more about how Quali Torque supports cloud cost optimization.

No. Traditional FinOps tools leverage customers’ cloud billing data and focus heavily on pricing, cloud platforms, and other purchasing decisions that can create savings opportunities.

Our customers use Torque alongside their FinOps tools to optimize the operational costs of their cloud infrastructure. Since Torque serves as the deployment and control layer for cloud infrastructure, the platform provides continuous monitoring of costs, recommends savings opportunities by streamlining operations, and enables users to act on those opportunities by automating governance and infrastructure lifecycle.

Torque also automates cloud resource tagging to enhance the value of insights from a FinOps tool. Users are required to select a tag from a picklist before launching a cloud environment, after which Torque will apply those tags to all resources deployed. This prevents missing and misspelled tags from creating blind spots in FinOps reporting.

Learn more about how Quali Torque supports cloud cost optimization.

Yes! Both Quali Torque and CloudShell help customers optimize hybrid cloud operations by normalizing infrastructure regardless of where it’s hosted and creating a reusable definition of environments in code. This allows end users to launch environments repeatedly as needed, thereby reducing provisioning delays.

Quali’s Torque infrastructure automation platform received SoC 2 Type II compliance certification following a thorough audit by a multinational professional services network and independent third-party auditor.

The SOC 2 reporting framework, created by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), sets benchmarks for managing user data. Achieving SOC 2 Type II compliance ensures current and future Quali customers that they have the proper security, privacy, and compliance controls in place to protect and manage its users’ data.

Torque includes out-of-the-box plugins and an extensive REST API for your existing CI/CD and DevOps tools, enabling you to automate the entire lifecycle of your environments directly from your own release pipeline. This allows you to automate the deployment of an environment when needed and automate the teardown when it is not.