What is Control Plane?

Overview of Control Plane’s multi-cloud orchestration platform. Covers architecture, Universal Cloud Identity, global load balancing, and key differentiators from traditional cloud.

Overview

Control Plane is a hybrid platform enabling cloud architects to combine the services, regions, and computing power of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and any other public or private cloud to provide developers with a flexible yet resilient global environment for building backend apps and services.

On Control Plane, microservices can run simultaneously across any combination of cloud infrastructure and connect to any combination of cloud services without embedded credentials. The platform handles identity propagation and authorization uniformly, utilizing best-practices and least-privilege principles consistently across environments.

Based on Kubernetes

While Kubernetes orchestrates workloads within a single cluster, Control Plane orchestrates an unlimited number of hardened, security-isolated Kubernetes clusters across all regions in major cloud providers. You can easily add additional Kubernetes clusters in any cloud as custom CPLN Platform (BYOK) regions. You can use Control Plane without in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, but if you already deployed your own clusters, the platform augments and extends your current Kubernetes infrastructure.

Why run on Control Plane?

Rather than restricting architects to a single cloud, Control Plane enables them to build a resilient, unified multi-cloud environment.

Some of the attributes which set Control Plane apart include:

• Multi-Region and Multicloud Compute: With Control Plane, your workloads run across any combination of geographic regions and cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP or any other public and private cloud). Kubernetes clusters hosted anywhere can be easily added to Control Plane. This enables you to switch or add cloud providers with a few clicks.

• Any Cloud Backing Service: Microservices running on Control Plane have native access to ANY service on ANY cloud (e.g., BigQuery on GCP, AD on Azure, SQS on AWS) without embedding credentials by using Universal Cloud Identity. This enables you to easily mix and match services from multiple clouds by virtually unifying networking, identity and authorization policies across all supported clouds. Control Plane’s Cloud Wormhole functionality enables your microservice to access native AWS, Azure, and GCP services within and across VPCs. Using Cloud Wormhole, workloads can also access endpoints behind firewalls on-prem and even on the developer’s laptop during development.

• Best-of-Breed DevOps Stack: Control Plane integrates the best of the cloud-native operations stack for metrics, logging, secrets management, software-defined VPN, geo-intelligent DNS, and more. You can also easily integrate the tools of your choice.

• Uniform Access Control: Control Plane provides consistent, fine-grained authorization controls. These controls are identical whether administering Control Plane itself or your custom workloads. Your workloads get an out-of-the-box fine-grained authorization “dial tone” that handles both simple and complex access patterns uniformly.

• Built-In Audit Trail: Control Plane provides a tamper-proof audit trail facility for both platform actions and custom workloads. Your code writes to a configured localhost port, and audit events are captured and secured automatically. Audit data is indexed and can be efficiently searched programmatically or via the user interface.

• Efficient Cloud Cost Optimization: Cloud consumption is optimized on Control Plane to use only the exact resources required, enabling serverless-like benefits without rearchitecting your microservices. Whether your app has a Dockerfile or not, or was originally designed for serverless, the platform runs your microservice with elastic scalability - from zero to any scale you specify.

• Unified Interface: Cloud platforms differ significantly in their APIs, CLIs, and UIs. Each has a specialized, often convoluted interface, with its unique and steep learning curve. Control Plane provides a symmetrical UI, API, and CLI that enables developers to deploy and run workloads in any cloud. It allows developers to deploy and manage workloads uniformly across multiple clouds simultaneously, from a single, consistent interface, making workload deployment and day-2 operations easy to manage.

The result: Enhanced performance for the end-user.

Control Plane utilizes advanced, redundant health monitoring and geographically-distributed DNS infrastructure. The platform automatically reroutes traffic to healthy regions and clusters. It removes unhealthy and unreachable nodes from rotation, improving availability and reducing latency for end users. A user from one part of the world experiences ultra-low-latency responses, while a user on the other side of the planet experiences similar ~20-30 ms latency.

Control Plane enables you to use the full range of services and the computing power your application requires across multiple clouds while delivering uniform and predictable performance to your users.