Data Plane vs Control Plane: What’s the Difference?

When discussing network management, planes are the integral components of networking architecture that describe the location where data processing occurs. Among these planes are the control and data planes. These layers establish the core networking concept of data transfer, describing the path of data, routing logic, and the actual data movement. Learning about these basic concepts can help you better understand how computer networks work.

This guide will take you through the essential data plane vs control plane differences and demonstrate their pros and cons.

What Is a Data Plane?

The data plane, also known as the forwarding plane, is a networking layer responsible for data movement from one system to another. It implements routing logic by moving data packets—small chunks of data—between different ports based on predefined rules.

When a packet reaches the network router through an interface, the data plane cross-checks the system logic, or routing table, to determine its path. Depending on the system logic, the data plane forwards the packet to an appropriate interface, which leads to the next destination. To further enhance the routing facility, the data plane can update packet headers, filter data, or apply quality of service (QoS) rules.

Pros of Data Plane

• The data plane implements congestion control and load balancing to manage data flow traffic, ensuring efficient resource utilization. It handles application performance by prioritizing traffic based on logic that complements service level agreements (SLAs).
• The data plane filters traffic according to access control lists (ACLs) to enforce security policies. With this feature, the data plane can automatically block or permit data packets based on IP addresses, protocols, and port numbers.

Cons of Data Plane

• The data plane is limited in terms of flexibility. If there is an error in the control logic, the data plane cannot identify and correct the issue; rather, it will blindly implement the incorrect logic.

What Is a Control Plane?

The control plane is the logical layer of any network that lays out rules on how to manage, route, and process data. It defines routing tables and network topologies to direct data packets through a network. The control plane also acts as a supervisor, coordinating communication between different components of the network to collect and manage data packets.

To create virtual networks and handle their traffic, the control layer facilitates software-defined networking (SDN) with the help of numerous networking protocols. Commonly used protocols include open shortest path first (OSPF), border gateway protocol (BGP), and enhanced interior gateway routing protocol (EIGRP).

Pros of Control Plane

• The control plane enforces policies like ACLs and QoS to ensure effective traffic routing and optimize network performance.
• This plane is easily adaptable, as it adjusts the devices or links depending on the requirements and updates the routing information.

Cons of Control Plane

• The control plane requires extra attention to manage data movement effectively. If not defined well, it can lead to increased latency and performance degradation.

Data Plane vs Control Plane: Key Differences

Let’s explore the difference between control plane and data plane to better understand how they coordinate networking systems.

Communication Method

• The data plane uses dedicated networks like satellite communication and WiFi to communicate between different systems.
• On the other hand, the control plane uses routing protocols like BGP, OSPF, and IS-IS to communicate between different systems.

Dependency

• The data plane doesn’t perform any logical operations on its own. It is the layer that obeys the orders of the control plane, following the rules and regulations as mentioned.
• In hindsight, the control plane provides the logic of data operations, establishing the fastest path for the data packet to travel through to reach the destination.

Operations

• The data plane performs data movement operations, including packet forwarding, switching, filtering, and decoding addresses, to ensure efficient data traversal.
• Contrarily, the control plane executes routing, path determination, and network policy protocols to manage traffic effectively.

How Does Data Plane or Control Plane Ties Into Data Pipelines or ETL?

Similar to networking, the data plane and the control plane play essential roles in managing the data pipeline and establishing data flow between different platforms.

The control plane in an ETL pipeline is responsible for orchestrating the flow of data between different tools. By performing tasks such as scheduling data jobs, defining pipeline logic, and performance monitoring, the control plane ensures resource optimization while migrating data.

In contrast, the data plane plays a crucial role in migrating data by following the control logic. This layer is responsible for the actual extraction, transformation, and integration of data between different systems. For managing data traffic, the data plane in an ETL pipeline provides a simplified way to integrate tools.

How Can Airbyte Complement Data Plane or Control Plane in the ETL Process

Manually performing data plane and control plane processes in ETL requires extensive data migration expertise. While some developers prefer to build connectors for their organization’s data migration needs manually, the lack of flexibility in such processes leads to error-prone solutions. To overcome this challenge and streamline data and control plane operations, you can use no-code tools like Airbyte.

Airbyte is a data engineer-friendly tool that provides you with multiple features to streamline your data consolidation journey. It automates the control plane logic and the data plane processes, providing the fastest way to migrate data between different platforms.

With over 400 pre-built connectors used by 7000+ companies daily, Airbyte enables you to effortlessly perform data transfer between different systems. If the connector you are looking for is unavailable, you can build your own connector with Airbyte’s connector development kit (CDK) or Connector Builder. The Connector Builder supports AI assistance that simplifies the configuration process by filling out most UI fields using the preferred platform’s API documentation.

The growth of AI workflows in daily processes has significantly increased. To keep up with this new generation of AI, Airbyte allows you to streamline GenAI workflows. You can quickly extract semi-structured and unstructured data. Further, with automatic chunking, embedding, and indexing, Airbyte enables you to transform this raw data and store it into popular vector databases.

In addition to its UI, API, and Terraform Provider, Airbyte offers a free-to-use Python library, PyAirbyte. With PyAirbyte, you can build flexible data pipelines utilizing the Airbyte connectors in your Python environment. This feature allows you to programmatically extract data from various sources and load it into various SQL caches compatible with popular AI frameworks like LangChain. These features facilitate the development of data-intensive LLM-powered applications.

To keep up with the best industry-specific standards, Airbyte prioritizes data security and privacy by adhering to GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. The newly added PII Masking feature enables you to automatically protect personally identifiable information (PII) using the hashing principle.

To further enhance its capabilities, Airbyte offers multitenancy and role-based access control, allowing you to manage multiple teams and projects in a single deployment.

Key Takeaways

A basic understanding of control plane and data plane is essential, as it provides you with the knowledge about the underlying principle of network management.

The control plane is the logical layer of any system, which describes routing and data transfer policies. Contrarily, the data plane implements the logic established by the control plane to move data between different systems.