Platform Engineering Tools to Make Your Developers More Productive

Yes! Many of our customers integrate Torque with Spotify Backstage to provide self-service access to application environments directly within their developer portal.

Other integrations include CLI and IDE tools as well as most major CI/CD platforms. Our customers use Torque to make application environments easier to run where developers need them.

Learn more about Torque integrations here.

Torque creates reusable templates in YAML format that define all the code for an application environment.

To create these templates, Torque discovers the user’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules from their repositories and provides a visual design tool so they can select the infrastructure and application services for their template.

As the user designs the environment, Torque automatically creates a YAML file defining the code for the infrastructure and application services, the parameters for deploying them, and the dependencies among them.

In Torque, users can click launch on this template to execute the plan in that file. Once provisioning is complete, the user can access the live environment, view the logs, and perform actions on the cloud resources they provisioned.

Torque’s self-service catalog allows anyone with access to provision infrastructure by simply clicking launch, eliminating the need to set parameters and security credentials.

To see an example, watch this video showing one-click provisioning for Terraform infrastructure via Torque.

Torque supports Terraform (all versions), OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Ansible, Helm, and native Kubernetes.

This support allows Torque administrators to create reusable templates for environments consisting of infrastructure and application services that are defined in various tools. For example, an environment template can include a cloud VM defined in Terraform, a storage bucket defined in CloudFormation, and a Helm application.

This eliminates the complexity of navigating the differences in tools to create an environment consisting of multiple assets.

Once created, that template can be used to provision the environment repeatedly.

While Terraform Cloud and Enterprise platforms help DevOps teams provision infrastructure defined in Terraform, Torque is a self-service developer platform for provisioning complete application environments.

Torque users don’t need to set parameters or security credentials to provision an environment. Admins can set developer-friendly names for these environments, so the user doesn’t need to know anything about the IaC modules or other tools used to define infrastructure.

As a platform engineering tool, Torque was designed to democratize the provisioning of infrastructure by normalizing it and providing a simple user interface. This removes the burden of provisioning all infrastructure from the DevOps team and allows developers to run the environments they need on demand.

Check out this blog article to learn more about the differences between Terraform Cloud and Quali Torque.

Torque integrates with CI/CD tools including Jenkins, CircleCI, and Azure DevOps.

Many of our users rely on Torque to automate the creation of environments directly within the stage of the pipeline that relies on them.

Torque also monitors the configuration and operation of these environments, which allows the platform to identify errors, configuration drift, and policy violations automatically.

Torque can also automate actions for application infrastructure, such as security validations, upgrade of application components, and termination of cloud resources after a pre-set duration.

And Torque reports provide visibility into the usage and performance of application infrastructure within the pipeline so DevOps teams can understand who is using which resources at any given time and pinpoint any errors or other issues immediately.

Since Torque initiates the provisioning of infrastructure, the platform can automatically allow or deny activity.

Administrators can set policies in Torque to prohibit specific activity. Some common examples include specific cloud platforms, resources, instance sizes, or configurations (e.g. “only allow private AWS S3 buckets”).

More advanced examples include requiring approval for environments that exceed a limit on expected cloud costs, environment runtime, or concurrent environments per user or team.

When a user attempts to provision an environment that violates these policies, Torque denies the action and triggers an approval workflow for the administrator.

This approach allows DevOps and development teams to provision infrastructure freely while ensuring that none of that infrastructure violates their governance standards.