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The Core Flow

Every deployment in Ctrlplane follows this flow:
  1. CI creates a version — After building, your CI tells Ctrlplane about the new version
  2. Policies are evaluated — Ctrlplane checks if approvals, dependencies, and gates are satisfied
  3. Job is dispatched — Ctrlplane tells your job agent (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, etc.) to deploy
  4. Deployment executes — The job agent performs the actual deployment
  5. Verification runs — Ctrlplane checks metrics (Datadog, Prometheus, HTTP) to confirm health
  6. Promote or rollback — If verification passes, continue; if it fails, roll back

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The Key Entities

You only need to understand 5 things:
EntityWhat It IsExample
ResourceA deployment targetprod-us-east-1 K8s cluster
EnvironmentA group of resources”Production” = all clusters with env: prod
DeploymentA service you deploy”API Gateway”
VersionA specific buildv1.2.3 or sha-abc123
PolicyRules for deployment”Require approval for production”

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How They Connect

Deployment × Environment × Resource = Release Target
When you deploy “API Gateway” to “Production” (which has 3 clusters), Ctrlplane creates 3 release targets:
  • API Gateway → Production → us-east-1
  • API Gateway → Production → us-west-2
  • API Gateway → Production → eu-west-1
Each release target can have its own policies, verification, and rollout timing.

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Dynamic Environments

Environments use selectors to automatically include resources: 
type: Environment
name: Production
resourceSelector: resource.metadata["env"] == "production"
When you add a new cluster with env: production metadata, it automatically becomes part of the Production environment. No config changes needed.

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Policies Control Everything

Policies define rules for when deployments can happen:
PolicyWhat It Does
ApprovalRequire sign-off before deploying
Environment ProgressionWait for staging before prod
Gradual RolloutDeploy to targets one at a time
VerificationCheck Datadog/Prometheus metrics
Deployment WindowOnly deploy during certain hours
Policies use selectors to target specific releases: 
type: Policy
name: production-approval-policy
description: Production Approval Policy
selectors:
  - environments: environment.metadata['requires-approval'] == 'true'
rules:
  - approval:
      required: 1

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Job Agents Execute Deployments

Ctrlplane doesn’t deploy directly—it tells job agents what to do:
AgentWhat It Does
GitHub ActionsTriggers workflow dispatch
ArgoCDCreates/syncs ArgoCD Applications
Terraform CloudTriggers Terraform runs
KubernetesApplies manifests directly
This means Ctrlplane works with your existing deployment tooling.

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A Complete Example

  1. GitHub Actions builds v1.2.3 and creates a version in Ctrlplane
  2. Ctrlplane creates a release for staging
  3. ArgoCD deploys to staging
  4. Verification checks Datadog metrics
  5. Staging passes → production release is unblocked
  6. Production requires approval → team lead approves
  7. ArgoCD deploys to production
  8. Verification confirms production is healthy

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What’s Next?

Quickstart

Build this pipeline yourself in 15 minutes

Use Cases

See specific deployment scenarios