Ctrlplane is a open-source release governance control plane that sits above your existing CI/CD, GitOps, and IaC tooling. It enforces promotion sequencing, policy gates, and rollout visibility across your entire environment surface.
When you operate 20+ Kubernetes clusters across multiple regions and tenants, the gap between "deployed" and "safely promoted" grows fast. These are the failure modes teams encounter every week:
CI/CD tools deploy software. They don't govern how it's promoted across your entire environment surface.
Ctrlplane does not replace your CI/CD pipelines, GitOps controllers, or IaC tooling. It sits above them, adding the promotion sequencing, policy enforcement, and rollout visibility that those tools were never designed to provide.
Three categories of control that CI/CD pipelines and GitOps controllers cannot provide on their own.
Define the exact order in which releases move across environments, regions, and clusters.
Codify approval requirements, change windows, and promotion rules as enforceable policy.
Know exactly which version of every service is running in every cluster, in every region, at all times.
A payment-service release across three regions, with backend-first promotion policy and staged observation windows.
Release v2.14.0 of payment-service is promoted to the staging environment. Integration tests, contract tests, and load tests execute automatically. All gates pass.
Ctrlplane promotes the backend service to US-West production clusters. A 30-minute observation window begins. Error rates, latency, and saturation are monitored against defined thresholds.
After the US-West observation window passes with no policy violations, Ctrlplane automatically promotes to EU-Central. The same observation window applies.
EU-Central passes observation. Promotion to AP-Southeast proceeds. All three regions now run the backend v2.14.0.
Only after backend v2.14.0 is confirmed healthy across all three regions does the frontend promotion policy allow checkout-ui v3.8.0 to begin its own staged rollout.
Ctrlplane understands your topology. It models regions, clusters, tenants, and environments as first-class primitives, so promotion policies map directly to how your infrastructure is organized.
Ctrlplane is designed for environments where security, isolation, and auditability are non-negotiable.
