Quali has added a control plane to its Torque platform to give DevOps teams the ability to consistently provision and orchestrate infrastructure across a heterogeneous distributed computing environment.
Amir Rosenberg, vice president of product for Quali, said the control plane allows DevOps team to centrally manage the provisioning of infrastructure via reusable blueprints accessed via a self-service portal, which individual developers can access. That approach eliminates a bottleneck that occurs when DevOps teams manually provision infrastructure on behalf of development teams, he said.
The latest release of Torque also adds enhanced visibility and cost control capabilities such as the ability to set limits for maximum duration and number of concurrent environments and limits for the total cost of an environment. Also included are cost reporting tools for Kubernetes clusters and improved forecasting and resource consumption policies that can be applied to blueprints, sandboxes and spaces.
Security enhancements include new customizable role-based access to blueprints, API Token Controls and integrations with secrets management platforms.
Through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Quali makes it possible to access Torque via either a cloud account or a user interface that connects to a GitHub account where blueprints are stored. The goal is to enable DevOps teams to maintain some control over how infrastructure is provisioned without impeding developer productivity, said Rosenberg, noting at a time when more organizations than ever are launching multiple application development projects, there is more sensitivity concerning developer velocity than ever.
It’s a fact that infrastructure misconfigurations happen because developers make mistakes. It’s not uncommon for a port to be left open, for example, which cybercriminals later exploit to exfiltrate data. Quali is offering a DevOps platform that makes it possible to centrally apply policies that act as guardrails to prevent developers from making provisioning mistakes. An alternative to scripts created using tools such as Terraform, the blueprints can deploy complete application environments automatically. That approach also provides more visibility into how resources are being consumed.
Every minute a developer spends managing infrastructure theoretically is one less minute they could be spending writing code. As application environments become more complex, Rosenberg noted it’s becoming that much more challenging for developers to cope with managing infrastructure as code. The issue is that DevOps teams who could provision infrastructure for developers are being overwhelmed by the number of projects they need to manage. As a result, DevOps teams are becoming bottlenecks. Naturally, that only encourages more developers to provision infrastructure on their own, which, Rosenberg noted, leads to more mistakes being made.
It’s not clear when or even whether IT organizations will look for an alternative to provision infrastructure in a way that doesn’t rely on developers as much, but most seem to agree that developers have far better things to do with their time.
