What is Control Plane?
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 unbreakable global environment for building backend apps and services.
On Control Plane, microservices can run simultaneously on any combination of cloud compute and consume any combination of cloud services without embedded credentials. The platform handles identity conveyance and authorization uniformly, utilizing best-practices/least privilege principles consistently and securely.
Based on Kubernetes
While Kubernetes orchestrates workloads within a single cluster, Control Plane orchestrates an unlimited number of hardened, security-isolated Kubernetes clusters in all the regions of the major clouds. You can easily add additional Kubernetes clusters running in any cloud as custom Bring Your Own Kubernetes (BYOK) regions. You can use Control Plane without in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes and its associated technologies but, if you have already deployed your own clusters, the platform augments and expands your existing Kubernetes infrastructure.
Why run on Control Plane?
Rather than restricting architects to a corner of the cloud, Control Plane enables architects to build a resilient, easy-to-use combination of clouds and cloud resources.
Some of the attributes which set Control Plane apart include:
Multi-Region and Multicloud Compute: With Control Plane, your workloads run agnostically across any combination of geographic regions and cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP or any other public and private clouds). Kubernetes clusters hosted anywhere can be easily added to Control Plane. This enables you to switch clouds or add clouds 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 the networking and 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 ops 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 advanced, consistent, yet easy-to-use 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 uniformly handles simple and complex use cases alike.
Built In Audit Trail: Control Plane exposes a tamper-proof audit trail facility for both the Control Plane actions you take as well as for custom workloads. Your code writes to a configured localhost port, and your audit events are correctly captured and secured. The audit data is indexed and can efficiently be searched programmatically from your user interface.
Efficient Cloud Cost: Cloud consumption is elastically optimized on Control Plane to run with the exact resources required and nothing else, enabling you to derive the benefits of serverless without rearchitecting your microservices. Whether your app has a Dockerfile or not, regardless of whether you designed the app to run serverless, the platform runs your microservice with elastic scalability - from zero to any scale you specify.
Unified Interface: The cloud platforms differ substantially from one another in their APIs, CLIs, and UIs. Each has its specialized, often convoluted interface surface, with its unique and steep learning curve. Control Plane offers a symmetrical UI, API, and CLI which enable you to deploy and run in any cloud. It enables developers to deploy and manage workloads uniformly to multiple clouds simultaneously, from a single, intuitive and consistent interface, making workload deployment and day-2 operations a breeze.
The result: Enhanced performance for the end-user.
Control Plane utilizes advanced, redundant health monitoring and geographically-distributed DNS infrastructure. The platform automatically re-routes traffic to healthy regions and clusters. It removes unhealthy and unreachable nodes from rotation, so the end-users measured availability and latency are optimal. 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 utilize the full range of services and computing power your application requires from any number of clouds while delivering your users uniform and predictable performance.