Blog
From the Control Plane blog
Cloud-native engineering, multi-cloud strategy, and platform deep-dives.
Cloud-Native Architecture: Principles, Patterns, and Building Portable Systems
Running on Kubernetes does not make your app portable. The decisions you make in the first six weeks, like how you split services, where state lives, and how you handle config, are what keep your system from getting locked into one provider. This guide covers the 12-factor factors that matter most, microservices decomposition, declarative infrastructure, and observability you build in from the start.
Twelve months of autoscaling work — Capacity AI and KEDA
Most Control Plane customers cut their compute bill 30–50%. Those results are based on two distinct autoscaling systems — Capacity AI for autonomous right-sizing, and KEDA for event-driven scaling — and a year of releases that turned both into something you can run aggressively in production. This post walks through both, then explains how they
7 min read
Backup and Disaster Recovery for Cloud-Native Teams: RTO, Runbooks, and Why Active-Active Changes Everything
Running live workloads across AWS, GCP, and Azure at once changes what disaster recovery means for your team. This guide covers RTO and RPO targets mapped to three workload tiers, 3-2-1 backup architecture for stateful data, priority-based DNS failover with routing tiers, and runbooks built around automated detection rather than a human noticing something is wrong.
17 min read
Kubernetes Architecture Explained: Control Plane, Data Plane, and What Managed Kubernetes Actually Abstracts
Most engineers know pods, Deployments, and Services well enough to ship every day. The architecture beneath those abstractions gets less attention, until you’re negotiating an EKS contract or debugging a scheduler backlog at 2 a.m. This guide walks through how the control plane, data plane, etcd, kube-scheduler, kubelet, and CNI plugins fit together as a system, what breaks when they don’t, and what managed Kubernetes actually takes off your plate.
18 min read
Control Plane agent infrastructure. Giving superpowers to any cloud.
In November we shipped an MCP server at mcp.cpln.io. Connect any MCP-aware AI agent — Claude, Cursor, Codex, Gemini — and it can operate the full Control Plane platform from natural-language prompts. We’ve followed that up with releasing an AI Plugin that includes the MCP server along with skills, agents, slash commands, and guardrails. This
6 min read
Top 10 FinOps Tools In 2026
84% of companies struggle with cloud spend. Here are the 10 best FinOps tools in 2026 to prevent waste, with pricing, actionability scores, and reviews.
10 min read
Beyond Backups: Architecture That Doesn’t Blink
During the October 20th AWS outage, not one Control Plane customer went down. Here’s the architecture that made that possible, and how to assess your own.
10 min read
Building the Bridge Across the Multi-Cloud Complexity Gap
Master the 2026 multi-cloud operating model. Bridge the complexity gap to enable autonomous AIOps, edge convergence, and shift-left security.
6 min read
Why Your Last Outage Was Mathematically Inevitable
In 2026, outages are certain. Master Resilience Velocity to survive the Complexity Horizon and turn a 15-hour AWS outage into a non-event.
6 min read
Why Cost-Cutting Usually Breaks Your Product (And What to Do Instead)
Reactive cloud cost-cutting leads to “Infrastructure Atrophy,” sacrificing performance and reliability for short-term savings. The 2026 solution is cloud cost optimization, leveraging scale-to-zero and pay-per-use architectures to eliminate idle waste without compromising product health.
6 min read