Control Plane vs Northflank

Day 2 is an application's life after the first deploy, including security patching, autoscaling, failover, observability, troubleshooting, and cost governance. Control Plane carries that work so a growing team does not have to hire a platform-engineering group to do it. It runs serverless, standard, stateful, cron, and full VM workloads on its managed compute in AWS, GCP, and Azure, in your own cloud accounts, or on your own servers, and teams never have to operate a Kubernetes cluster to use any of it.

PaaS speed on day one, without the ceiling

Control Plane gives developers the speed of a modern PaaS: sign up, connect a repository, push, and ship, with self-serve databases and a review environment for every pull request. What sits underneath is a multi-cloud, compliance-grade foundation the application never has to migrate off.

Push to GitHub or GitLab and it ships

Connect a GitHub or GitLab repository, push, and Control Plane builds and deploys it, with your Dockerfile or Cloud Native Buildpacks and no pipeline configuration to write. Developers get git-push simplicity, and platform engineers keep what a PaaS usually takes away: policy governance, security gates, and a full audit trail. Teams that want more control can also deploy through Terraform, Pulumi, GitOps with Argo CD, the API, or drop-in workflows for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitbucket Pipelines, CircleCI, Google Cloud Build, and Jenkins. Northflank's builds run on its own proprietary build and release system inside the platform.

Turnkey, self-serve databases with zero lock-in

Control Plane delivers turnkey, self-serve PostgreSQL, MySQL, and beyond, with platform-level compliance and zero cloud lock-in. The catalog lists more than 80 maintained services, including PostgreSQL in single, highly available, and multi-location forms, pgEdge, Redis multi-location, MySQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse, Cassandra, Kafka, CockroachDB, and the Coraza web application firewall. Install any of them from the console in a few clicks, or with cpln helm install, Terraform, or Pulumi. Databases replicate across locations and clouds, pgEdge runs active-active PostgreSQL where every location accepts writes, backups run on a schedule to S3, GCS, or MinIO, and every connection is authenticated with zero-trust SPIFFE workload identity over mTLS, with no public database ports. Northflank's built-in addons cover PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, MinIO, and S3-compatible buckets, with custom Helm-based addons on bring-your-own-cloud clusters, and each one lives inside a single-region or single-cluster project.

A review environment for every pull request

Control Plane spins up an instant, isolated staging environment for every pull request, triggered directly by your Git webhooks and updated on every push. Previews scale to true zero while nobody is testing, so a stack of open pull requests uses no compute overnight. Northflank's preview environments run on standard services with no documented automatic scale-to-zero, so idle previews keep burning compute until someone pauses them or they expire.

Sign up and deploy, no sales call

Sign up, create an organization, connect a repository, and deploy from the console or the cpln CLI. The quickstart puts a sample application in AWS and GCP behind one global HTTPS endpoint in minutes. For large multi-region and multi-cloud rollouts, the Control Plane team offers architecture reviews as an optional enterprise benefit, never as a gate.

Day 2 operations, built in

Unbreakable compute with automatic regional and cross-cloud failover

Control Plane deploys into a Global Virtual Cloud (GVC), one application environment that spans the locations you pick. It routes each request to the nearest healthy location with latency-based DNS, location priority tiers decide which regions take over when preferred ones fail, and the GVC alias can follow a specific workload's readiness instead of a bare TCP check. If a region or an entire cloud provider goes down, traffic moves to the surviving locations with no one paged to do it, backed by a 99.999% uptime SLA. Northflank's geo-routing is an API setting that sends traffic to project, service, and port backends by continent or proximity, and it requires Northflank's CDN.

Observability across every cloud and region

Logs from every location land in one LogQL query surface, labeled by provider, location, GVC, workload, container, and replica, so an operator can follow one service across clouds and then isolate the failing location. Metrics are queryable with PromQL at an organization-wide endpoint with Grafana built in, and OpenTelemetry tracing goes to a platform-hosted backend by default. Northflank provides per-service metrics, log search with text and regex filters, and forwarding to external tools, and it does not document a query language for logs or metrics or a hosted tracing backend.

Capacity AI right-sizes workloads from real usage

Capacity AI studies each workload's historical usage and adjusts its CPU and memory allocation up or down within the limits you set, resizing standard and stateful workloads in place where the cluster supports it. Serverless workloads scale to zero when idle and bill nothing while they wait. Autoscaling covers concurrency, requests per second, CPU, memory, latency percentiles, and KEDA event sources. Northflank autoscales horizontally on CPU, memory, requests per second, and custom metrics, sizing each instance is a manual plan choice, and it does not document automatic, request-driven scale-to-zero for services.

Isolation for every workload by default

Every Control Plane workload runs in its own microVM through Kata Containers on Firecracker, so a container escape stays inside that workload's VM boundary. Workloads cannot call the Kubernetes API or reach networks and volumes they were not granted, traffic policy is enforced at the network layer by Istio and Envoy, and firewalls deny by default. On your own compute, sensitive workloads can be pinned to dedicated nodes.

Cross-cloud service freedom

Universal Cloud Identity keeps credentials out of your code

A Control Plane identity is attached to a workload and follows its replicas to every location. When the application's AWS, GCP, or Azure SDK asks for credentials, Control Plane answers on the standard cloud metadata address, negotiates with that cloud's token service, and hands back short-lived, least-privilege tokens. No long-lived keys sit in images or configuration. One identity can combine permissions for all three clouds with NATS NGS, Cloud Wormhole access, and native private endpoints such as AWS PrivateLink and GCP Private Service Connect, so a single service on your own hardware can read an S3 bucket, query BigQuery, and write to Azure Cosmos DB. Northflank's workload identity supports AWS and GCP, and its BYOK guide lists workload identity among the features Northflank does not set up on imported clusters.

Cloud Wormhole reaches private systems without a VPN project

Cloud Wormhole agents tunnel workloads into VPCs and on-prem networks behind firewalls, with no client software or VPN configuration on the workload side. Access is granted per identity, down to specific hosts and ports, agents run active-active, and an HTTPS proxy lets applications inside the private network call Control Plane workloads in return. A private database or legacy API stays private while the services that depend on it move. Northflank's private connectivity runs through a Tailscale integration that requires your own tailnet, OAuth client, and tag policy, plus VPC ingress and private load balancers on its bring-your-own-cloud clusters.

mTLS between services across clusters and clouds

Control Plane's service mesh encrypts and authenticates every workload-to-workload call with mutual TLS, using a unique certificate per workload that rotates every hour, including calls between GVCs and between clouds. A receiving workload can restrict callers to named workloads, its GVC, or the organization, and services call each other by internal name. Northflank's multi-project networking connects projects only in the same team and on the same cluster. Private traffic between clusters or clouds goes over its Tailscale integration on your own tailnet, and Northflank does not document mTLS between services.

One application definition for every location

Northflank organizes deployments into projects. Its documentation is direct about the boundary: a project's region cannot be changed after it is created, and every service, job, addon, and volume in the project deploys to that region or to the selected cluster. Serving users from four regions means four projects, each holding its own copy of every service.

A Control Plane GVC spans the locations you pick across AWS, GCP, Azure, and your own infrastructure. A workload is defined once with shared defaults and optional per-location overrides, and it runs in every location the GVC includes.

A release, a policy review, or an incident investigation on Control Plane starts from one workload definition. Northflank templates can generate the 48 regional resources, but each remains a separate object with its own platform identity, and the team builds the connections between them.

Run on any infrastructure, including your own

MK8s turns your servers into managed Kubernetes

Managed Kubernetes (MK8s) starts from Linux servers, whether bare metal, virtual machines, or cloud instances, and joins them with a script into a CNCF-certified cluster whose control plane and upgrades Control Plane operates. Add the platform add-on and the cluster becomes a location in your GVC, with the same identity, networking, and observability as managed compute. Northflank's BYOK path imports a cluster you already run, and its responsibility matrix leaves provisioning, Kubernetes upgrades, node operations, the CNI, and storage drivers with you. Its requirements also warn against importing clusters that already run production workloads.

GPUs inside the same application model

AI workloads land in the same GVC as the rest of the application, so a model server on owned H100s and a GPU pool in AWS share one identity, private network, and set of dashboards. GPUs bill per second, and GPU Ocean pools accelerator capacity from multiple providers, including reserved capacity and bare metal.

Containers, VMs, and databases side by side

Virtual machines next to containers

Control Plane runs full Linux and Windows virtual machines as a first-class workload type. VMs get the same service discovery, firewall, mesh, identity, Cloud Wormhole access, and observability as containers, so an application that needs its own guest OS, or cannot be containerized yet, moves onto the platform now and modernizes on its own schedule. Stateful databases from the catalog run beside both in the same GVC, on one platform.

Built for developers and AI agents

Sandboxes for AI coding agents

Control Plane sandboxes give each agent session its own microVM, sized from 2 to more than 16 CPUs and built from a blueprint that carries its tooling, such as cloud CLIs and coding agents. Each sandbox gets a dedicated TLS endpoint and has no execution time limit. Agents reach cloud services through Universal Cloud Identity, so there are no credentials for them to leak, and they reach private networks through Cloud Wormhole. Sandboxes sleep automatically when idle and wake in under a second. Northflank's sandboxes and Cloud Harness workspaces pause and resume only as manual actions, with no documented idle sleep.

Sandbox Manager is a separate product for developer workspaces, with a browser IDE and terminal, remote IDE and SSH access, and persistent storage. A Fork action builds a new reusable toolbox image from changes detected in a running workspace.

Automation through every interface

Where Northflank stops at an API, a CLI, a JavaScript client, and templates, Control Plane is one REST API with full-parity interfaces on top: the CLI, the console, official Terraform and Pulumi providers, a Kubernetes operator, and an MCP server that lets AI assistants operate infrastructure conversationally. Each one works with the same GVC, identity, and placement model.

The architecture dilemma: a single-cluster PaaS, or a platform you never outgrow

Building on Northflank means building on projects that are each fixed to one region or one cluster. A first release fits that model. The ceiling arrives later: a second region means a second copy of every service, private networking stops at the cluster boundary, moving onto your own servers means operating the cluster yourself, and platform-level PCI DSS Level 1 is not on offer. Teams that hit that ceiling end up rewriting how the application is deployed. Control Plane is the platform you never outgrow, with git-push deploys and self-serve databases on day one, and multi-cloud resilience, virtual machines, and PCI DSS Level 1 compliance ready the day you need them, without changing platforms.

Why teams choose Control Plane over Northflank

Control Plane vs Northflank, side by side

Pricing and total cost

Control Plane bills by the millicore of CPU and the megabyte of memory actually allocated, with no contracts, minimums, or seat fees. A workload with 50 millicores and 128 MB costs about $4.01 per month at list rates, so development environments start small and run on the same model as production. GPUs bill per second.

Load balancing, TLS certificates, and secrets management, which clouds bill separately, come with the platform. Teams typically cut cloud compute costs 30 to 50 percent, and SAFE Health reports a 75 percent drop in AWS spend. Northflank is usage-based on its managed cloud, and running it in your own cloud adds a per-cluster, per-vCPU, and per-GB platform fee on top of the cloud bill you already pay.

Frequently asked questions

• What is the main difference between Control Plane and Northflank?

  Northflank organizes deployments into projects, and each project is tied to one region or one cluster. Control Plane deploys each workload into a Global Virtual Cloud (GVC), where every location is an attribute of one application. On that model, Control Plane handles failover between regions and clouds, mTLS between services across clusters, credential-free access to AWS, GCP, and Azure services, private-network access through Cloud Wormhole, automatic CPU and memory right-sizing, and observability across the whole footprint.

• Does Control Plane support git-push deploys and preview environments?

  Yes. Connect a GitHub or GitLab repository and every push builds and deploys, with no pipeline configuration to write. Every pull request gets its own isolated, ephemeral environment triggered by your Git webhooks, and previews scale to true zero while idle. Platform teams keep policy governance, security gates, and audit trails, and can also deploy through Terraform, Pulumi, or GitOps with Argo CD.

• Can Northflank deploy one service to several regions?

  Not as a single service. Northflank's documentation states that a project's region cannot be changed after it is created and that every resource in the project deploys to that region, so running in four regions means four projects with a copy of the service in each. On Control Plane, one workload definition runs in every location its GVC includes, and services talk to each other over mTLS across all of them.

• Does Control Plane make sense in a single region of one cloud?

  Yes. Many Control Plane customers run in a single region of a single cloud. They use it to take Day 2 operations off their team, with automatic right-sizing through Capacity AI, scale-to-zero, built-in logs, metrics, and tracing, managed databases from the template catalog, isolation for every workload, and a 99.999% uptime SLA. Adding a second region or cloud later means adding a location to the GVC.

• Do I need Kubernetes experience to use Control Plane?

  No. Teams never have to operate a Kubernetes cluster to use Control Plane. Teams that want Kubernetes can have it: Managed Kubernetes (MK8s) turns Linux servers, including bare metal and virtual machines, into a managed cluster with the control plane and upgrades handled, and Bring Your Own Kubernetes (BYOK) connects an existing cluster as a location. Northflank's BYOK path imports a cluster you already run and leaves provisioning, Kubernetes upgrades, node operations, the CNI, and storage drivers with you.

• How does workload identity compare between Control Plane and Northflank?

  Control Plane's Universal Cloud Identity issues short-lived, least-privilege AWS, GCP, and Azure credentials to a workload wherever it runs, including your own servers, with no stored keys. Northflank's workload identity supports AWS and GCP, and Northflank does not set it up on imported clusters.

• Can Control Plane run virtual machines?

  Yes. Control Plane runs full Linux and Windows virtual machines as a workload type with the same identity, networking, firewall, and observability as containers. Northflank runs container workloads, isolated in Kata microVMs by default on its managed cloud, and has no virtual machine workload type for full Linux or Windows guests.

• How does Control Plane pricing compare to Northflank?

  Control Plane bills by the millicore of CPU and the megabyte of memory, with no contracts, minimums, or seat fees. A workload with 50 millicores and 128 MB costs about $4.01 per month, and teams typically reduce cloud compute costs 30 to 50 percent. Northflank is usage-based on its managed cloud, and its bring-your-own-cloud option adds a per-cluster, per-vCPU, and per-GB platform fee on top of your cloud bill.

Sources

Reviewed September 2026 against each vendor's documentation. Control Plane: GVC, service-to-service mTLS, Identity, Cloud Wormhole agent, Logs, Capacity AI, MK8s, Template Catalog, CI/CD, Pricing. Northflank: Deploy to a region, Multi-project networking, Import an existing cluster (BYOK), Workload identity, Autoscaling, Pricing, Security, Changelog.