Data planes overview

Data planes are the logical groupings of the runtimes in the landscape.

You can create data planes by grouping the runtimes based on the selection criteria that are applied to the following fields of the runtime
  • Runtime name
  • Region
  • Location
  • Tags
  • Runtime type
  • Deployment type
Dataplane concept

Assume that Company A uses the AWS and Azure versions of the IBM Cloud platform. The company has runtimes that are scattered in three different regions - in the United States, Europe, and Australia as shown in the figure. Each region has three staging runtime environments - development, pre-production, and production. You can logically group the existing nine runtimes based on your requirement. In this case, the following three data planes are formed:

  • DataPlane_Dev (by grouping all the development environments in the landscape)
  • DataPlane_Pre-prod (by grouping all the pre-production environments in the landscape)
  • DataPlane_Prod (by grouping all the production environments in the landscape)

After the data planes are added, federated API management can now manage and monitor all the three data planes and its associated assets. You can take informed business decisions based on the data plane performance metrics. For example, if an API makes fewer transactions in one region than in the other two regions, necessary action can be taken to improve their business in that region with fewer API transactions.