3.1 Control Plane vs Agent Execution Plane

Orbnetes deployment and release orchestration documentation for operators and platform teams.

Orbnetes architecture is split into two operational layers:

  • Control Plane (Web/API + DB)
    Responsible for governance and orchestration:
    • projects and scope isolation,
    • blueprints and release definitions,
    • launch decisions, approvals, and rollback policy,
    • permissions, audit, and notifications,
    • pipeline/job state tracking.
  • Execution Plane (Agents on hosts)
    Responsible for command execution:
    • long-polling API for claimable jobs,
    • running step commands in shell,
    • streaming status/logs/heartbeat,
    • artifact metadata/reporting,
    • update and runtime metrics reporting.

Why this split matters:

  • You can harden governance centrally while scaling execution horizontally.
  • Pipeline logic stays server-side; execution remains close to infrastructure.
  • Incidents are easier to reason about because orchestration and execution responsibilities are clearly separated.