Control, Data, and Work Planes
Control Plane
The control plane is the central management system responsible for orchestrating and managing the target environment. It serves as the brain of the overall system environment, handling tasks such as:
- Provisioning: Orchestrate the deployment of resources. Including dynamic scaling and lifecycle management of the provisioned elements.
- Configuration Management: Correlated with provisioning, validate configuration of resources. Ensure consistency and compliance.
- Observability: Provide insights into the real-world state of the resources with pluggable standards for monitoring, logging, alerting, and more.
- Accounts and Roles: Establish a permissions framework that allows the setting of the appropriate level of access to and for resources.
Data Plane
The data plane describes the persistency part of the management or control plane that hosts the shared repository for all digital twin resources.
It should not be confused with the same term used in networking architectures as conceptual layer to describe traffic flows through a network (sometimes also known as user plane, forwarding plane, or carrier plane).
Work Plane
The work plane is the operational heart of the target environment. In contrast to the control plane, the computational bulk work of processing, storing, and transmitting of data is delegated to the work plane.
Similar work, but minute, also occurs in the control plane. The work plane output can be designed for specialized use cases (for example, an object storage or database service), or can be architected for generic capabilities (for example, infrastructure, runtimes, or universal runtimes with the help of container technology).
Think of the work plane as a worktable on the factory floor, whereas the management plane with its accounting and planning function is located in another building.
Interactions of Planes
Understanding the interplay between these planes is crucial for designing and managing efficient environments. The planes typically materialize as microservice components on runtimes (hosted on manually managed machines, or on fully managed work planes). Suitable building blocks enable recursive design patterns, facilitating for example, the architecture of Hosted Control Planes or Managed Service Providers.
Keep in mind that software concepts for management systems have evolved over the past decades.
Modern cloud infrastructures1 are built as distributed systems, managed with multiple planes, often building on top of one another.