In this blog post, we'll talk about the significant challenge of managing and governing a growing number of APIs across multiple teams in an organization — and how Control Plane Groups are a clear solution to avoid the chaos of inconsistent policies and operational bottlenecks.
Scaling your API infrastructure is tough. Managing a sprawling landscape of APIs, especially across multiple teams, can feel like an impossible task. As your organization grows, so does the number of teams and APIs, each with its own set of requirements. This often leads to a disparity in how policies are applied, making consistent governance a monumental challenge.
Kong Konnect's Control Plane Groups offer a powerful federated deployment model to get it right. It’s all about striking that perfect balance between centralized governance and team autonomy. Let's take a deep dive into how you can empower your teams to roll out their APIs independently while a central team ensures everything remains secure, compliant, and efficient.
Control Plane Groups in Kong Konnect provide a structured way to manage multiple control planes within a single organization. Think of it as a federated approach: different teams can deploy and manage their own APIs while still adhering to overarching policies set by a central governance team.
Crucially, teams only have access to their assigned control planes, preventing them from impacting one another. This separation ensures autonomy without sacrificing consistency.
Control Plane Groups are about finding the right balance between centralized guardrails and decentralized innovation. Here’s how it plays out in practice.
A central team (often platform or security) manages the global control plane. Here, they enforce organization-wide policies that apply to everyone. These foundational rules may include the following.
These baseline controls provide every team with a secure and compliant foundation to build upon.
Product teams or business units are given their own control planes. Within their dedicated space, they’re enabled to do the following.
This model empowers teams to take full ownership of their API lifecycle while staying aligned with organizational standards.
The real flexibility comes from layering policies across levels as indicated below.
This layered system creates the perfect blend of top-down consistency and bottom-up autonomy.
Imagine a large enterprise with several business units.
Each unit operates autonomously, but all remain protected under the organization’s global governance framework.
As organizations scale their API programs, security and compliance quickly become make-or-break factors. Every new API introduces potential risk. Without consistent enforcement, gaps are inevitable. Control Plane Groups directly address this by weaving security and compliance into the fabric of the deployment model.
Control Plane Groups don’t just help teams move faster; they make security and compliance scalable.
Platform teams sit at the intersection of governance and enablement. They’re responsible for making sure APIs are delivered securely and consistently, while ensuring development teams can move quickly. Control Plane Groups give them the toolkit to achieve both.
This shift transforms platform teams from perceived blockers into true enablers of delivery and innovation.
Control Plane Groups don’t operate in isolation. They integrate seamlessly with other Kong Konnect features, strengthening the platform as a whole.
This integration makes Control Plane Groups the backbone of a connected, scalable API ecosystem. Teams get autonomy, platform leaders maintain oversight, and the organization benefits from consistent, secure delivery.
Kong Konnect’s Control Plane Groups provide a sophisticated solution for implementing a federated API deployment model. By merging centralized governance with team-level autonomy, organizations can scale their API strategy efficiently without sacrificing security, compliance, or operational consistency.
By adopting Control Plane Groups, your organization can empower teams to deploy APIs independently, maintain enterprise-level security and compliance, and scale API infrastructure without creating bottlenecks.
A quick refresher: Kong Cloud Gateways Kong Cloud Gateways are fully managed, high-performance data planes running on customer-dedicated infrastructure, orchestrated and operated by Kong through Kong Konnect . Customers can choose between: Serverle
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