What Is Control Plane?

In modern application architectures, a control plane configures rules for the data plane. In addition to the control and data planes, cloud-native management also operates via a management plane.

When deploying cloud-native applications, this management system is needed to simplify the creation and implementation of traffic management and security policies across distributed environments. Due to their lack of visibility and gaps in governance, distributed environments expand the threat surface and increase the likelihood of outages.

The control plane resides above the data plane, as a separate entity, and enforces rules for the data plane. It was originally a policy engine for Layer 4 networking and now also has influence over Layer 7 traffic in Kubernetes. After the data plane governs data flow through applications and pod-level app behavior, the control plane guides the data plane, overseeing orchestration and coordination of containers, nodes, pods, and clusters. The control plane’s components make global decisions about the cluster (e.g. scheduling), while detecting and responding to cluster events.

To learn more about what the control plane can do, read The New Stack article Data, Control, Management: Three Planes, Different Altitudes.