Marko Anastasov for Superplane

Posted on Jan 27

An “n8n for DevOps” Control Plane - Superplane

#devops #opensource #cloud #automation

We’re launching Superplane, an open-source control plane similar to n8n that orchestrates your entire DevOps workflow.

If this sounds interesting, please give us a star on GitHub ⭐ it helps us grow the project.

The Problem Superplane is Tackling

Deploying to production is rarely a straightforward process.

You’ve got CI/CD pipelines in to manage, release management in Jira, incident response in PagerDuty, monitoring in SigNoz, notifications in Slack. And somewhere in between, you’re manually coordinating all of them.

You can’t simply write a script that will handle all the cases of a complex workflow, where one thing has to happen after this other thing is done running. Creating a mental map of these workflows is also no easy task.

DevOps workflows are fragmented across a dozen tools, and we built the first control plane to orchestrate them all. Yes, we were inspired by n8n a lot.

The “n8n for DevOps” Vision

If you’ve used n8n, you know the magic: visual workflows, event-driven triggers, integrations with everything.

But here’s the thing, n8n is built for general automation. It’s amazing for connecting your CRM to your email, or syncing data between APIs. But when it comes to DevOps processes like deployments and progressive rollouts, you still have to manage custom nodes, states, and hope your webhooks don’t timeout.

What if there was an n8n specifically for DevOps?

A platform where you define your operational workflows once, and they just… work.

With Superplane, you define your services, environments, releases, incidents, and signals in one place. This way it’s easy to understand how your system behaves and what the exact workflow is. The tribal knowledge of your DevOps team gets captured.

We’d love it if you could please give us a star on GitHub ⭐ as it helps us sustain the project.

What Makes Superplane Different

Superplane isn’t trying to replace your CI/CD, your monitoring, or your incident management tools. Instead, it’s the control plane that orchestrates them.

Event-driven Workflows

Superplane listens to events from your existing tools:

CI pipeline completes → trigger workflow
Schedule hits → run maintenance task
Webhook arrives → process and route
Alert fires in PagerDuty → start incident response

You define workflows visually (like n8n), but with DevOps-specific primitives built in.

Operational Context

Unlike generic automation tools, Superplane understands DevOps concepts:

Approval gates: Require human approval before proceeding
Policy checks: Enforce business hours, deployment windows, team policies
Progressive rollouts: Deploy in stages with verification between each
Multi-service coordination: Wait for multiple repos/services, then fan-in

Self-Hosted, Open Source

Superplane runs on your infrastructure. You own your workflows and data, everything is tailored to self-hosting needs.

After months of assembling the team and building this from ground up, we’re finally ready to share Superplane with the world. We’re launching early, we’re moving fast, and there are rough edges. But we believe it’s ready for teams to start using it across different organizations.

Reliability and State Management

Every DevOps engineer reading this must be thinking: "This sounds nice, but what happens when things go wrong?"

These are the hard problems in orchestration, and we've built Superplane to handle them.

Durable State Persistence

Every workflow execution is stored in PostgreSQL. Events flow through the system with tracked states (pending → routed → finished), and each node execution records its input, output, and status. If Superplane restarts, nothing is lost, it picks up where it left off.

Configurable Retries for HTTP Requests

The HTTP component supports:

Configurable retry count: Set how many times to retry failed requests
Two timeout strategies: fixed (same timeout each attempt) or exponential (timeout doubles each attempt, capped at 120 seconds)
Retry metadata tracking: Each attempt records its status, so you can see exactly what happened

End-to-End Event History

Every event and execution is logged with full context like inputs, outputs, timestamps, and state transitions. When something goes wrong, you can trace exactly what happened, when, and why.

Inspectable Workflow Runs

The control plane UI lets you inspect runs, see status at each step, and understand where things are stuck or failed. No more digging through logs across 5 different systems.

Real Workflows for Running Superplane in Production

Here's what teams are actually building with Superplane:

Policy-Gated Production Deploy

CI finishes green
  → Check: Is it business hours? (No → hold)
  → Check: Is on-call engineer available? (No → notify and wait)
  → Require: Product manager approval
  → Trigger: Production deployment
  → Verify: Health checks pass
  → Notify: Team in Slack

All in one workflow. No manual coordination needed.

Progressive Delivery

Deploy to 10% of traffic
  → Wait 5 minutes
  → Check: Error rate < 0.1%? (Yes → continue, No → rollback)
  → Deploy to 30% of traffic
  → Wait 5 minutes
  → Check: Error rate < 0.1%? (Yes → continue, No → rollback)
  → Deploy to 60% of traffic
  → Wait 5 minutes
  → Check: Error rate < 0.1%? (Yes → continue, No → rollback)
  → Deploy to 100% of traffic

Automated progressive rollout with automatic rollback on failure.

"First 5 Minutes" Incident Triage

Incident created in PagerDuty
  → Parallel: Fetch recent deploys (last 2 hours)
  → Parallel: Fetch health metrics (error rate, latency)
  → Parallel: Check recent code changes
  → Combine: Generate evidence pack
  → Create: GitHub issue with context
  → Notify: On-call engineer with summary

Automated incident response that gives you context before you start debugging.

How to Run Superplane

Superplane is self-hosted. You can run it on a single host or on Kubernetes.

Quick start:

docker pull ghcr.io/superplanehq/superplane-demo:stable
docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 -v spdata:/app/data -ti ghcr.io/superplanehq/superplane-demo:stable

Then open http://localhost:3000 and start building workflows.

Production installation:

Single Host Installation - Deploy on AWS EC2, GCP Compute Engine, or other cloud providers
Kubernetes Installation - Deploy on GKE, EKS, or any Kubernetes cluster