The control plane and the data plane

IntegraCI is a control plane. It generates manifests, CI steps, and resource definitions, delegates execution to your tools and runtimes, and records and acts on the results. It does not run your scanners or your builds. Key points:

• The control plane holds identity, policy, the audit trail, and the orchestration that ties stages together. The data plane is where work actually executes: your CI runners, your clusters, your scanners, your registries.
• Drawing this line correctly is the first architectural decision. Most scaling and isolation questions resolve once you are clear about which side a component lives on.
• The governed AI gateway sits in the control plane and is cross-cutting: every model call and every tool an agent touches routes through it, so policy, approval, and audit apply with no side path around them.