Control Plane vs Data Plane

QNSP separates control plane operations from data plane operations.

Control plane

Management operations that configure the system:

• Tenant provisioning
• Key creation and rotation policies
• Access control policy updates
• Service account management
• Audit configuration

Control plane operations are:

• Lower throughput
• Strongly consistent
• Fully audited

Data plane

Runtime operations that process data:

• Encrypt/decrypt operations
• Secret retrieval
• Storage read/write
• Search queries
• Token validation

Data plane operations are:

• High throughput
• Eventually consistent where safe
• Optimized for latency

Isolation

Control and data plane share authentication but have separate:

• Rate limit pools
• Failure domains
• Scaling characteristics