Control Plane Platform

What do you like best about the product?

Back in 2021, I was tasked with building out the full architecture for a new startup with limited time and resources. One of the first things I knew I needed was to bring on board a top notch DevOps engineer or lead, someone with deep knowledge and experience spinning up new infrastructure from scratch with security and stability in mind. Hiring was very tough during that time, and the recruitment process was taking longer than I expected. A friend and former coworker from the Jet.com days suggested I explore Control Plane, and arranged a meeting.

That meeting ultimately solved the need for one of my first and most important hires to be a DevOps engineer. Control Plane's capabilities blew me away. Their deep knowledge of infrastructure, multi cloud support, and security minded approach were at the core of their platform. I signed up right there and then, which was one of the best decisions of my tenure at that startup. The speed of spinning up new infrastructure myself through their platform pleasantly surprised me, and their team's tools and support were world class. Not being tied to a specific cloud, with multi cloud capability right out of the box, made their product stand out even more.

I would recommend that any and every startup explore Control Plane, and put their most important resources toward building their vision instead of building out infrastructure.

What do you dislike about the product?

Better support for GovCloud. During the time I used them that support was limited

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The need for deep knowledge and expertise in spinning up secure infrastructure

What do you like best about the product?

I like that I can set up a cloud for my app in a matter of minutes and get right to writing and hosting logic, as opposed to regular cloud providers that take hours, if not days, just to get a simple backend deployed. I also love how Control Plane lets me pick and choose cloud providers to best suit my needs. It minimizes dev ops and allows me to focus directly on writing the business logic for my applications without worrying about infrastructure setup and management. Once the cloud provider accounts are set up, it's quite fast to get something straightforward and simple up and running.

What do you dislike about the product?

Control Plane is quite complex and intimidating to get started with due to its impressive and heady feature set. This can make it challenging initially to get going. Using templates could be beneficial in understanding how everything fits together, as getting something concrete and "blessed" up and running makes it easier to play and explore the features.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Control Plane minimizes DevOps overhead, letting me focus on writing business logic without worrying about infrastructure. It allows quick setup and hosting of apps, choosing cloud providers to suit needs.

What do you like best about the product?

I find Control Plane extremely valuable for its ease of use, acting as a centralized area to manage my application stack. It's like a backstage for Kubernetes, making it seamless to handle everything. I also love how it simplifies global load balancing, especially during capacity issues or failures, easing what would otherwise be a complicated process. Additionally, its ability to manage multi-cloud environments without many connectors is really efficient. The initial setup was very easy too, which I appreciate.

What do you dislike about the product?

I think Control Plane could benefit from more integration with third-party products. It works well with cloud and environment management, but adding functionalities like hooking telemetry in could provide even more value. Having it act more like a centralized controller would be great.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Control Plane helps manage multi-cloud environments efficiently without needing many connectors, simplifies global load balancing, and centralizes my application stack, streamlining GRC processes in a modernized stack.

What do you like best about the product?

Control plane provides companies with platform engineering as a service that’s more secure and scalable than most teams can realistically build on their own. That frees up your engineering team to spend more time focused on your direct value proposition, instead of maintaining the underlying platform.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing to complain about—their platform does what it claims, and the team is great and responsive whenever I've needed help.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

This improved our Kubernetes setup in a previous business and let us shift staff focus toward more valuable areas of the product roadmap.

What do you like best about the product?

What I value most is how easy it is to manage our infrastructure. We don’t have a dedicated platform engineer, and Control Plane helps us keep our headcount down while still staying on top of things. I also appreciate the updates that introduce new, important features. Overall, it’s straightforward for technical folks to get up and running with.

What do you dislike about the product?

At times, the interface can make it harder to access certain features. I understand it’s necessary to support a rich feature set, but the added complexity can still slow things down when I’m trying to move quickly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It’s easy to scale as we grow. With auto-scaling, we can set clear thresholds and not have to worry about whether our infrastructure will handle high-usage periods followed by low-usage periods. It saves money and gives us real peace of mind.

What do you like best about the product?

We have been using Control Plane for four years and have seen it grow and evolve quite a bit during that time. The first thing that stands out is their support. Whenever we have had an issue, they have been very quick to respond and help us get it resolved.

We also enjoy the cost savings we get whether using a single cloud provider or multiple cloud providers.

Their Cloud Wormhole technology has also been very useful for us. It allows us to securely access databases and other resources across one or more cloud providers without having to expose those resources publicly.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is not much we dislike about Control Plane. After using it for four years, we have not run into any significant drawbacks or tradeoffs that stand out. When we have encountered problems, their team has been quick to address and resolve them.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The biggest problem Control Plane solves for us is cost. We are able to save on our cloud infrastructure costs while still having the flexibility to use one or multiple cloud providers.

What do you like best about the product?

The platform provides the flexibility and resilience of Kubernetes with ease of management via the console, as well as unprecedented visibility into cost, usage, performance and resilience.

The support team are response and engage quickly, and are very willing to dive into the technical detail, even going so far as to assist with updates to automations.

The platform provides several templates for hosting well know platforms including Postgres, Kafka, MongoDb, etc.

Connecting these services in a secured and structured way is well organized and boils down to configuration and automation with helm charts.

The pricing of services and usage is well understood and reasonable, and configuring services according to budget is very easy to manage and observe.

We have tested some of the AI MCP capabilities, but not extensively at this stage, as we would like to maintain control while we establish a controlled environment.

What do you dislike about the product?

At this stage there are no obvious downsides from based on the capabilities that we have used, aside from the AI tooling which we have not used extensively as yet.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The platform provides an managed hosting capability which minimizes the operational burden on our team. We do not have a large team, and we would like to keep it that way, so we lean into automation to help us scale.

This approach fits well with the choice of ControlPlane, where we have the flexibility to build solutions with a myriad of integrations, without the burden of managing infrastructure.

What do you like best about the product?

I do enjoy the Terraform integration with Control Plane, as it provides direct infrastructure as code integration, which is the reason I chose it over competitors like Railway. I also appreciate the MCP for debugging stuff. Additionally, the initial setup was extremely easy, making the onboarding process smooth.

What do you dislike about the product?

I find logging challenging to get right or sift through.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Control Plane simplifies the complexity of our infrastructure by handling containers without images or networking. I chose it for its direct infrastructure-as-code integration, especially appreciating the Terraform integration and MCP for debugging.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that Control Plane makes it very easy for us to have multi-regional, scaled deployments for infrastructure within in our own managed AWS account. We were able to achieve mostly automated infrastructure deployments in a much shorter period of time than we could have managed alone. Additionally, the support team is responsive, competent, and patient. I liked that they didn't charge us a lot upfront, making it easy to get started and experiment with their tool. It was important for us to have control over our infrastructure, and Control Plane allows us to maintain that ownership while enabling rapid modernization.

What do you dislike about the product?

There were definitely some road bumps in the beginning with Control Plane, which I can attribute to us being one of their first customers. While the initial experience with setting up was a bit tough, I think the Control Plane team has worked hard to make it a smoother experience now.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are a small team with no dedicated infrastructure engineers. ControlPlane helps us achieve the mature infrastructure that we need as a healthcare and regulated medical device product without the time and effort.

What do you like best about the product?

I love the flexibility and support. Great product and great team! It also reduces complexity compared to competitors.

What do you dislike about the product?

There's been a few issues here and there, but the team is so responsive and resolves blockers quickly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It allows us to run on any cloud providers and gives us redundancy without being overly complex and expensive.