Enterprises today face a critical challenge: Cloud environments are growing in complexity faster than they can be manually managed. The tools many infrastructure teams rely on are also known to create operational silos and inconsistent processes. The goal is to move beyond legacy cloud management platforms (CMPs), which usually lack consistency and governance. And the way to do that is with agentic AI.
Sooner rather than later, agentic AI agents will be coordinating tasks between tools, tickets, and dashboards, operating on sophisticated, multi-layered systems designed to enable autonomy, adaptability, and intelligence across complex environments. But to make this happen, we need a robust layered architecture.
To demonstrate this point, this blog will take a deep dive into the architecture of the autonomous infrastructure capabilities of Quali Torque, inventory discovery, blueprint design, agent execution, policy enforcement, automated remediation, and see how a layered platform can factor into evolving business operations.
Why is layered architecture important?
A layered architecture, by design, helps break down complex systems into distinct, manageable components; for example, curation, operation, and self-service. As each layer can handle specific functions, it gives agentic AI the freedom to interact with individual components without disrupting the entire system.
This modularity allows AI agents to focus on specific tasks such as resource discovery, policy enforcement, or remediation, while scaling across hybrid or multi-cloud environments. It’s critical for agentic systems as they need to handle dynamic workloads and integrate new tools or clouds without requiring system-wide overhauls.
Each layer also helps coordinate automation tasks, for example, drift detection or policy-driven actions, which AI agents can execute autonomously. With embedded governance at each level, AI-driven actions remain within organizational boundaries.
By organizing functions into layers, the architecture also ensures that failures in one layer don’t cascade across the system, thereby maintaining business continuity. This approach also helps DevOps, SRE, and FinOps teams maintain operational control.
Platforms such as Quali Torque are helping organizations address challenges inherent in legacy systems through an integrated approach that combines current intelligent automation capabilities with a roadmap toward more autonomous operations.
What Quali Torque brings to autonomous operations
Torque is a cloud-based SaaS solution that optimizes and simplifies cloud infrastructure management across its full lifecycle, from Day 0 to Day 2. It supports various use cases, including software development environments, machine learning operations, demonstrations, training sessions, and proof-of-concept projects.
Quali Torque operationalizes this layered model by organizing infrastructure automation into three domains:
- Cloud Curate
- Operate
- Self-service
Together, they enable self-service infrastructure and application deployment features, all while ensuring necessary governance and control.
Domain 1: Curate
The Curate feature identifies existing cloud infrastructure code, such as Terraform and other resources, and transforms it into standardized, reusable blueprints. Teams can define environment requirements (e.g., “I need a dev environment with a Kubernetes cluster, RDS database, and S3 bucket.”), using structured templates, and Torque’s Open Policy Agent (OPA)-based policy engine will evaluate these against organizational standards before deployment.
Why it matters: Curate eliminates the inconsistency and compliance gaps inherent in ad-hoc scripting by providing standardized infrastructure patterns with embedded governance controls. It can also foster repeatability and reduce deployment variability and setup time, providing standardized access to infrastructure patterns while embedding compliance at the blueprint level.
Curate capabilities:
- Automatic discovery: All IaC, Config and cloud instances are discovered, normalized and standardized into re-usable, easy to understand, infrastructure building blocks.
- Asset repository integration: Connects to current source control repositories that include Terraform modules, Helm charts, Ansible playbooks, AWS CloudFormation templates, Kubernetes manifests, and Shell scripts.
- Cloud provider connectivity: Integrates with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, VMware vCenter/vSphere technology, and Kubernetes clusters.
- Resource inventory: Thorough exploration and documentation of current resources, both in the cloud and on premises.
- Blueprint creation: Convert individual assets into reusable blueprints to enable uniform implementation across various environments.
Domain 2: Operate
The Torque Operate feature continuously monitors deployed environments to detect configuration drift, policy violations, and resource utilization anomalies. The platform can correlate events across infrastructure layers and execute predefined remediation workflows based on policy rules.
With agentic AI, we can take this to the next level. For example, in a Kubernetes scenario, it will be able to identify security violations, assess impacts, and recommend autonomous remediation or review, learning from outcomes to refine future detections. In that sense, policy triggers enable automated compliance decisions, shifting from alerts to action.
Why it matters: Operate moves beyond simple alerting to provide contextual analysis and automated response capabilities, minimizing the need for human intervention in routine operational scenarios. As the platform evolves, we can benefit from enhanced pattern recognition capabilities that will enable more sophisticated analysis and autonomous remediation workflows.
Operate capabilities:
- Torque execution agents: Lightweight, containerized instances running on Kubernetes clusters or Docker environments can connect with the Torque backend to carry out deployment tasks.
- Agent deployment options: Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, Google GKE, Oracle OKE, self-managed Kubernetes, on-premises Docker hosts.
- Built-in Quali agent: A ready-to-use execution agent for deploying Terraform and AWS CloudFormation that eliminates the need for a custom agent setup.
- Environment lifecycle management: Comprehensive management of the state from initial setup to final removal.
- Day-2 Operations: Continuous environmental management encompasses updates, monitoring for changes (drift detection), and maintenance processes.
Domain 3: Self-Service
Torque’s Self-Service capability enables policy-driven resource management through automated discovery of idle resources, estimates potential cost savings, and executes approved optimization actions.
By implementing governance policies at the blueprint stage, infrastructure teams can ensure that all provisioned environments comply with their predefined standards without blocking operational velocity. Triggers also ensure requests stay within guardrails, allowing autonomous provisioning without governance trade-offs.
Why it matters: In contrast to legacy portals that can potentially expose organizations to risks through unchecked access, the Self-Service domain delivers cost-effective automation while maintaining governance boundaries. This balance can reduce or help eliminate manual oversight for routine provisioning and cost optimization. Soon, telemetry-driven adaptations can further optimize workloads in real-time.
Self-Service capabilities:
- Governance catalog: A comprehensive environment catalog that incorporates governance through established policies, approval processes, and RBAC.
- One-click deployment: Simplified implementation of both cloud and on-site infrastructure, management of container deployments and orchestration, as well as overseeing the application lifecycle.
- Policy engine: A comprehensive governance framework that ensures compliance and cost control.
- Approval workflows: Customizable approval workflows incorporated within IT service management systems.
Agentic AI enables the creation of self-managed systems that can adapt their environments in real-time, based on fluctuations in workload. Soon, these systems will be able to efficiently allocate resources and ensure compliance by using telemetry data.
Torque’s three-domain architecture directly addresses the four fundamental requirements for agentic systems:
- Seamless access: The Curate domain provides unified access to a diverse range of infrastructure assets and cloud providers.
- Reasoning and planning: The Operate domain’s AI capabilities analyze, diagnose, and recommend actions based on the real-time state of the infrastructure.
- Component orchestration: Execution agents can coordinate deployments across hybrid environments while maintaining state consistency.
- Guardrails: The Self-Service domain’s policy-driven governance helps ensure that autonomous operations remain within organizational boundaries and comply with relevant requirements.
Deployment models
For most organizations, deployment models are not just a technical choice, they’re critical for meeting compliance mandates, data sovereignty requirements, and robust security standards. Torque’s architecture is designed with deployment flexibility that helps align with organizational priorities:
- Single-tenant SaaS: Dedicated infrastructure provides enhanced security and compliance while enabling rapid onboarding, reduced management overhead, and continuous feature updates.
- Multi-tenant SaaS: Shared infrastructure with rapid deployment and managed operations for organizations balancing speed with governance requirements.
- Private instance: Complete control and support for on-premises deployment for highly regulated industries requiring stricter sovereignty or security assurances.
This flexibility enables infrastructure teams to adopt intelligent automation without compromising regulatory obligations or exposing sensitive data, making it ideal for sectors where sovereignty, security, and regulatory compliance are critical.
Torque facilitates extensive deployment options on various public cloud platforms:
- Public clouds ( Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and GCP)
- Private clouds (such as OpenStack and VMware vCenter/vSphere)
- Hybrid cloud deployments
- Container platforms (Kubernetes and Docker)
- On-premises data centers (physical infrastructure and virtualized environments)
Integration ecosystem
Torque integrates with existing toolchains, minimizing the risk of potential disruption to established workflows:
- Developer tools: Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, plus CLI, REST API, and IDE extensions.
- ITSM and governance: ServiceNow integrations and OPA-based policy enforcement.
- Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and webhook notifications for team coordination.
These integrations avoid the inclusion of disjointed integrations of legacy scripts and ensure that Torque fits into organizational workflows rather than replacing them. This approach helps boost productivity and governance across ecosystems.
Conclusion
Torque’s three-domain architecture, Curate, Operate, Self-Service, provides a strong foundation for autonomous infrastructure management. By unifying discovery, monitoring, and self-service within a unified policy framework, the platform reduces operational overhead while maintaining enterprise compliance and control requirements.
While Torque currently provides intelligent automation capabilities, the platform is evolving toward more sophisticated autonomous operations, building a unified framework that enables DevOps to gain rapid self-service provisioning, SREs to enforce operational guardrails, and FinOps to ensure cost efficiency, all within the same governed workflows.
As infrastructure complexity continues to grow, Torque represents the evolution from manual processes and fragmented tools toward coordinated systems that handle routine operations automatically while preserving strategic human oversight. The platform’s architecture positions organizations to benefit from current intelligent automation capabilities while building the foundation for future autonomous operations.
Explore Quali Torque’s capabilities by watching this video, or head over to the Playground to experience the difference yourself.