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Control Plane Topologies

important

This feature is in private preview for select customers in Upbound Spaces. If you're interested in this deployment mode, please contact us.

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Control Plane Topologies is not yet available for Cloud Spaces. This feature is currently available for Connected and Disconnected (Self-Hosted) Spaces only.

Upbound's Control Plane Topology feature lets you build and deploy a platform of multiple control planes. These control planes work together for a unified platform experience.

With the Topology feature, you can install resource APIs that are reconciled by other control planes and configure the routing that occurs between control planes. You can also build compositions that reference other resources running on your control plane or elsewhere in Upbound.

This guide explains how to use Control Plane Topology APIs to install, configure remote APIs, and build powerful compositions that reference other resources.

Benefits​

The Control Plane Topology feature provides the following benefits:

  • Decouple your platform architecture into independent offerings to improve your platform's software development lifecycle.
  • Install composite APIs from Configurations as CRDs which are fulfilled and reconciled by other control planes.
  • Route APIs to other control planes by configuring an Environment resource, which define a set of routable dimensions.

How it works​

Imagine the scenario where you want to let a user reference a subnet when creating a database instance. To your control plane, the kind: database and kind: subnet are independent resources. To you as the composition author, these resources have an important relationship. It may be that:

  • you don't want your user to ever be able to create a database without specifying a subnet.
  • you want to let them create a subnet when they create the database, if it doesn't exist.
  • you want to allow them to reuse a subnet that got created elsewhere or gets shared by another user.

In each of these scenarios, you must resort to writing complex composition logic to handle each case. The problem is compounded when the resource exists in a context separate from the current control plane's context. Imagine a scenario where one control plane manages Database resources and a second control plane manages networking resources. With the Topology feature, you can offload these concerns to Upbound machinery.

Control Plane Topology feature arch

For full documentation, see the Self-Hosted Spaces Control Plane Topologies guide.