Hosted Control Plane
Konstruct Hosted Control Plane is a SaaS offering where Civo manages the control plane tier on your behalf. You get the downstream team's Konstruct platform self-service experience — GitOps workflows, cluster provisioning, application delivery — without provisioning or operating the control plane infrastructure yourself.
What is the Hosted Control Plane?
In the standard Konstruct architecture, you run three tiers:
- Control Plane Cluster — hosts the Konstruct operators and API
- Management Cluster — hosts ArgoCD, Crossplane, and your platform tooling
- Workload Clusters — run your applications
With the Hosted Control Plane, Civo operates tier one. You manage tiers two and three.
Architecture
The diagram below shows how the hosted model connects your infrastructure to the Civo-managed control plane.
┌──────────────────────────────┐
│ Civo-Hosted Control Plane │
│ konstruct.saas.civo.com │
│ (Managed by Civo) │
└──────────────┬───────────────┘
│
Bootstrap via GitOps
│
▼
┌──────────────────────────────┐
│ Your Management Cluster │
│ (Civo Kubernetes) │
└───┬──────────┬───────────┬───┘
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐
│Workload │ │Workload │ │Workload │
│ Cluster │ │ Cluster │ │ Cluster │
│ (Civo) │ │ (AWS) │ │ (GCP) │
└─────────┘ └─────────┘ └─────────┘
The control plane communicates with your management cluster through GitOps — it commits configuration to your GitOps repository, and ArgoCD running on your management cluster reconciles the desired state. No direct inbound network access to your clusters is required.
Benefits
No infrastructure to manage for the control plane. Civo handles upgrades, scaling, availability, and security patching of the Konstruct control plane operators, API, and UI.
Instant onboarding. Sign up, connect a Civo cloud account, and create your first management cluster — all from the browser at konstruct.saas.civo.com. No Helm install, no cluster prerequisites.
Civo-native integration. Your Civo API key is the only credential required to start. Management clusters provision directly onto Civo Kubernetes, so you get tight integration with Civo networking, DNS, and storage defaults out of the box.
Full ownership of your platform tier. Your management cluster, GitOps repository, and workload clusters remain under your control. You own the ArgoCD applications, infrastructure code, and cluster configurations. The hosted control plane does not manage your management or workload clusters directly.
Supported Clouds
| Tier | Hosted Control Plane | Self-Hosted Control Plane |
|---|---|---|
| Control Plane | Civo (managed) | Any Kubernetes |
| Management Cluster | Civo | Any Kubernetes |
| Workload Clusters | Civo, AWS, GCP | Civo, AWS, GCP, Azure, bare metal |
Multi-cloud management cluster support (AWS, GCP) is on the hosted control plane roadmap and is available if you self host the control plane. See SaaS Limitations for current constraints.
Hosted vs Self-Hosted
| Hosted | Self-Hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Minutes | Hours to days |
| Control plane infra | Civo manages | You manage |
| Control plane access | UI only | Full kubectl |
| Customization depth | Management + workload tiers | All three tiers |
| Auth | Civo account | Configurable (Dex, OIDC) |
For a full feature-by-feature comparison, see Hosted vs Self-Hosted.
Choose Hosted if you want the fastest path to a working platform and do not need to customize the control plane itself.
Choose Self-Hosted if you need air-gapped operation, custom control plane components, or specific compliance requirements over all tiers. See Limitations for details.
What's Next?
- Quickstart — get your first cluster running in under 30 minutes
- Civo Account Setup — connect your Civo cloud credentials
- Limitations — understand current constraints before you start