A cloud infrastructure consists of the physical infrastructure, network configuration, and cloud platform software.
In large data centers, the cloud platform software required for managing user workloads runs on separate servers from where the actual workloads run. The services that manage the workloads coupled with the hardware on which they run are typically called the control plane, while the servers that host user workloads are called the data plane.
In MCP, the control plane is hosted on the infrastructure nodes. Infrastructure nodes run all the components required for deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of your MCP cluster. A special type of infrastructure node called the foundation node, in addition to other services, hosts a node that runs the bare-metal provisioning service called MAAS and the Salt Master service that provides infrastructure automation.
MCP employs modular architecture approach by using the Reclass model to describe configuration and distribution of services across the infrastructure nodes. This allows the product to arrange the same services into different configurations depending on the use case.