What is Ctrlplane?
Ctrlplane is an open-source platform that solves two critical challenges for platform and DevOps teams:- Deployment Orchestration — Progressive delivery with policy-driven environment promotion, approval workflows, and automated verification
- Infrastructure Inventory — Unified visibility into resources across your entire stack with custom relationships and dynamic grouping
The Two Systems
1. Deployment Orchestration
Ctrlplane’s deployment system handles the complexity of promoting releases through environments with configurable policies, gates, and verification. Key Capabilities:- Progressive Delivery — Canary rollouts, blue-green deployments, and phased environment promotion
- Policy-Driven Workflows — Define approval gates, environment sequencing, and deployment constraints
- Automated Verification — Integrate with Datadog, Prometheus, or custom endpoints to validate deployments before promotion
- Environment Promotion — Automatically promote successful releases from staging → production with configurable gates
- Rollback & Recovery — Automatic rollback when verification fails or manual intervention triggers
- Multi-region deployments with sequential promotion
- Platform teams managing deployments for 100+ microservices
- Enforcing deployment policies across engineering organizations
- Gating production deployments on staging verification
2. Infrastructure Inventory
Ctrlplane provides a unified inventory of your resources with powerful relationship modeling and dynamic grouping — giving you visibility that spans Kubernetes clusters, cloud resources, and custom infrastructure. Key Capabilities:- Resource Discovery — Auto-sync resources from Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, or custom providers
- Custom Relationships — Model dependencies, ownership, and service connections between resources
- Dynamic Grouping — Use selectors to create views based on metadata, labels, or custom attributes
- Rich Metadata — Attach arbitrary metadata for filtering, grouping, and automation
- Cross-Stack Visibility — See Kubernetes deployments, cloud functions, VMs, and databases in one place
- Understanding service dependencies across your infrastructure
- Building dynamic deployment targets based on resource attributes
- Tracking which version is deployed where across all environments
- Creating custom views for different teams (backend services, data pipelines, etc.)
When to Use Ctrlplane
Ctrlplane is designed for platform teams who need:| Challenge | How Ctrlplane Helps |
|---|---|
| Multi-environment promotion is manual | Automated environment progression with policy gates |
| No visibility into what’s deployed | Real-time inventory of resources and their versions |
| Deployments lack verification | Integrated verification with Datadog, HTTP checks, etc. |
| Rollbacks are slow and manual | Automatic rollback on verification failure |
| Infrastructure spread across providers | Unified inventory with custom relationships |
| Different teams need different policies | Flexible policy engine with environment/deployment selectors |
| Scaling deployment orchestration | Handle 1000s of release targets with a single deployment definition |
Core Concepts
| Entity | Description |
|---|---|
| System | Logical grouping of related deployments (e.g., “Payment Stack”) |
| Resource | A deployment target (K8s cluster, VM, Lambda function) |
| Environment | Logical stage that groups resources (dev, staging, prod) |
| Deployment | A service or application to deploy |
| Version | A specific build/release of a deployment |
| Release Target | The combination of Deployment × Environment × Resource |
| Release | A version deployed to a release target |
| Job | The execution unit that performs the deployment |
| Policy | Rules governing approvals, progression, and verification |
Integration Points
Ctrlplane integrates with your existing stack: CI/CD Systems:- GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI — create versions after builds
- Kubernetes Jobs, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD — execute deployments
- Datadog, Prometheus, HTTP endpoints — validate deployment health
- Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, custom scripts — sync infrastructure inventory