What is Ctrlplane?
Ctrlplane is the orchestration layer between your CI/CD pipelines and your infrastructure. Your CI builds code. Your infrastructure runs it. Ctrlplane orchestrates the rest through three core concepts:| Concept | Question It Answers | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | What to deploy and how | ”API Service” deployed via ArgoCD |
| Environment | Where to deploy | ”Production” = all clusters with env: prod |
| Policy | When to deploy | ”Only after staging succeeds and SRE approves” |
Start Here
Why Ctrlplane?
See the problems Ctrlplane solves—you’ll recognize them
5-Minute Overview
Understand the mental model quickly
Quickstart
Set up your first deployment pipeline in 15 minutes
Comparisons
How Ctrlplane fits with ArgoCD, Spinnaker, GitHub Actions
Two Core Systems
Deployment Orchestration
Control when and where releases happen:
- Auto-promote after verification passes
- Approval gates for production
- Gradual rollouts across regions
- Automatic rollback on failure
Infrastructure Inventory
Track what exists and what’s running:
- Real-time resource inventory
- Dynamic environment membership
- Version tracking across all targets
- Works with K8s, AWS, GCP, custom
Common Use Cases
| Scenario | What Ctrlplane Does |
|---|---|
| Multi-region deployments | Deploy to 10 clusters sequentially with verification between each |
| Environment promotion | Auto-promote staging → prod when verification passes |
| Deployment verification | Check Datadog metrics before marking a deploy successful |
| Infrastructure inventory | Answer “what version is running where?” instantly |
| Dynamic environments | New clusters auto-join environments via selectors |
Who Uses Ctrlplane?
| Team | Use Case |
|---|---|
| Platform Engineering | Building an IDP with deployment orchestration and infrastructure visibility |
| DevOps / SRE | Enforcing deployment policies and tracking what’s running where |
| Scaling Startups | Moving from “we manually deploy” to automated, policy-driven releases |
| Multi-region Teams | Coordinating deployments across clusters/regions with a unified inventory |
How It Fits Your Stack
Ctrlplane doesn’t replace your CI or deployment tooling—it coordinates them:| Layer | Tools | What They Do |
|---|---|---|
| Build | GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins | Build artifacts, create versions in Ctrlplane |
| Orchestrate | Ctrlplane | Decide when/where to deploy, enforce policies |
| Execute | ArgoCD, K8s Jobs, GitHub Actions, Terraform | Perform the actual deployment |
| Monitor | Datadog, Prometheus | Provide metrics for verification |