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Control Plane — Overview (June 2026)

Archived 2026-10-09

This June-2026 narrative page was superseded by the rewritten page at planes/control/overview.md (design plan P1). It is kept for provenance; its responsibilities were carried into the 2026 model, its service list was merged per the ownership map.

Historical — archived

This page is kept for provenance. Its dates, targets and technology statements are not current direction. See the linked replacement page.

Reviewed 2026-10-09

Corrections: identity is not owned here but by the canonical Identity Platform (ADR-0101); policy definitions and audit are owned by Trust & Operations; approval instances stay here and approval policy moves to Trust & Operations; agent and skill publication is owned here and the runtime keeps a read model. The claim that the orchestration domain is "already implemented in ConnectSoft.AI.SoftwareFactory.Platform" is incorrect: that repository holds placeholder workflows and schemas only. No ConnectSoft.Factory.ControlPlane.* service exists.

The Factory Control Plane is the governance and orchestration brain of the ConnectSoft AI Software Factory — the platform that operates the factory itself. Where the Agent Mesh executes work and the Knowledge Platform supplies grounded context, the Control Plane decides what should happen, who is allowed to make it happen, in what order, and whether the result is acceptable. It is the authoritative system of record for every tenant, project, blueprint, workflow instance, agent task, policy decision, audit entry, and cost record in the factory.

Target Architecture — Final-State Design (June 2026)

This page described the final-state target architecture of the Control Plane as a set of cooperating, independently deployable microservices under the ConnectSoft.Factory.ControlPlane.* namespace, grounded in the factory coordinators (Project Bootstrap, Sprint Execution, Milestone Lifecycle, Microservice Assembly, Release) and the orchestration domain of ConnectSoft.AI.SoftwareFactory.Platform.

Purpose

The Control Plane exists to make the factory governable and repeatable at multi-tenant scale. Every customer SaaS the factory produces is the output of a long-running, multi-step, multi-agent process that spans intent capture, blueprint design, code generation, validation, integration, and release. That process must be:

  • Traceable — every action correlates back to a single traceId from business intent to running SaaS.
  • Reusable — blueprints, workflow definitions, agent and skill definitions, and policies are versioned, catalogued assets reused across tenants and projects.
  • Autonomous — workflows advance without human intervention by default, escalating to humans only at defined approval gates or on failure.
  • Governed — policy is evaluated and recorded for sensitive transitions; nothing irreversible happens without a recorded decision.
  • Observable — the full lifecycle of every workflow and task is queryable, replayable, and emits canonical events.
  • Multi-tenant — strict tenant isolation, edition-based entitlements, and quota enforcement are enforced at every entry point.

Role in the Factory

flowchart LR
    Studio["Factory Studio<br/>(human intent & review)"] -->|commands| ControlPlane["Control Plane<br/>(orchestration brain)"]
    ControlPlane -->|assigns AgentTasks| AgentMesh["Agent Mesh<br/>(execution)"]
    AgentMesh -->|requests context| Knowledge["Knowledge Platform"]
    AgentMesh -->|produces artifacts| ControlPlane
    ControlPlane -->|drives pipelines| DevOps["DevOps & GitOps"]
    ControlPlane -->|evaluates policy| Governance["Governance, Security & Compliance"]
    ControlPlane -->|emits events| Observability["Observability & Feedback"]
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Core Responsibilities

Responsibility Description
Identity & access Authenticate humans and services (OpenIddict-based), issue and validate tokens, and authorize every operation against tenant and project scope.
Tenancy & entitlement Own tenants, editions, subscriptions, feature flags, and quotas; enforce multi-tenant isolation and edition-based capabilities.
Project & module management Maintain the catalogue of factory projects, their environments, modules, and inter-module dependencies.
Blueprint lifecycle Parse, validate, version, and store blueprints, context maps, and domain models that define what the factory will build.
Workflow orchestration Instantiate workflow definitions, drive their state machines, assign agent tasks, persist process state, and support deterministic replay.
Agent & skill governance Register agent and skill definitions, manage agent pool capacity, and apply model policies that constrain which models agents may use.
Policy, approval & audit Evaluate policy on sensitive transitions, manage human approval gates, and write an immutable audit trail.
Cost & usage Meter token, compute, and task consumption per tenant/project and roll it up for billing and quota enforcement.
Integration Manage outbound/inbound connections to external systems (Git providers, identity providers, cloud, billing).

Key Capabilities

  • Definition-driven orchestration — workflows, agents, skills, and policies are declarative, versioned definitions.
  • Durable, replayable workflows — every workflow instance is an event-sourced state machine whose complete history can be replayed.
  • Interchangeable agents — the Control Plane assigns work via the Agent Task Contract; any registered agent satisfying the required role and skill can execute it.
  • Policy as a gate, not an afterthought — the PolicyEngineService is consulted before sensitive transitions, and every PolicyDecision is recorded for audit.
  • Quota and cost awareness — orchestration respects edition entitlements and quotas; usage is metered continuously and rolled up for billing.
  • Tenant-isolated by construction — every aggregate, store, event, and API carries tenantId.

High-Level Component View

The Control Plane was composed of ten bounded contexts, each realised as one or more microservices with its own datastore (database-per-service).

flowchart TB
    subgraph IdentityAccess["Identity & Access"]
        IdentityService
        AuthorizationService
    end
    subgraph TenantEdition["Tenant & Edition"]
        TenantService
        EditionService
        QuotaService
    end
    subgraph ProjectMgmt["Project Management"]
        ProjectService
        EnvironmentService
        ModuleCatalogService
    end
    subgraph BlueprintMgmt["Blueprint Management"]
        BlueprintService
        BlueprintValidatorService
        DomainModelService
    end
    subgraph WorkflowOrch["Workflow Orchestration"]
        WorkflowOrchestrator
        TaskAssignmentService
        ProcessStateService
    end
    subgraph AgentMgmt["Agent Management"]
        AgentRegistryService
        SkillRegistryService
        AgentPoolManager
    end
    subgraph GovernanceCtx["Governance"]
        PolicyEngineService
        ApprovalService
        AuditService
    end
    subgraph CostUsageCtx["Cost & Usage"]
        CostUsageService
    end
    subgraph IntegrationCtx["Integration"]
        IntegrationService
    end
    subgraph ArtifactMgmt["Artifact Management"]
        ArtifactService
        LineageService
    end

    IdentityAccess -->|authorizes| WorkflowOrch
    TenantEdition -->|entitlements & quota| WorkflowOrch
    ProjectMgmt -->|project & module context| WorkflowOrch
    BlueprintMgmt -->|validated blueprints| WorkflowOrch
    WorkflowOrch -->|AgentTasks| AgentMgmt
    WorkflowOrch -->|policy checks| GovernanceCtx
    WorkflowOrch -->|artifacts| ArtifactMgmt
    WorkflowOrch -->|usage| CostUsageCtx
    IntegrationCtx -->|external systems| WorkflowOrch
    GovernanceCtx -->|audit trail| ArtifactMgmt
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Integration with Other Platforms (June 2026)

Platform Relationship
Factory Studio Human-facing entry point. Submits intent and approvals as commands; reads workflow/task state and audit from Control Plane APIs.
Agent Mesh Executes the agent tasks the Control Plane assigns; returns execution results and emitted artifacts.
Knowledge Platform Consumes the canonical event stream for lineage; supplies context packages that agents use during task execution.
Governance, Security & Compliance Shares policy definitions and consumes audit/decision events; the Control Plane embeds the policy decision point.
DevOps & GitOps Receives release/promotion commands from Release workflows; reports pipeline outcomes back as integration events.
Observability & Feedback Subscribes to all Control Plane events via the canonical envelope for tracing, metrics, and feedback loops.

Final-State Summary (June 2026)

In this version the Control Plane was a fleet of independently deployable .NET 10 / ASP.NET Core microservices following Clean Architecture and DDD, communicating over MassTransit on Azure Service Bus, persisting to per-service Azure SQL / PostgreSQL databases with Redis caching, secured with OpenIddict-based identity and multi-tenant SaaS extensions. The 2026-10-09 design keeps the intent and replaces the shape: one modular host, the MessagingModel port (ADR-0012), canonical identity and tenancy, and a single run authority (ADR-0014).