How We Use Control Loops to Manage Dragonfly Cloud Datastores

A control loop is a continuous, non-terminating process that monitors the actual state of a system, compares it to the desired state, and takes corrective actions to align them. Dragonfly Cloud uses control loops for managing datastores across multiple cloud providers and regions. The control plane exposes APIs for customers to create, update, and delete datastores, networks, connections, and backups. Each datastore has a control loop that runs at a fixed 10-second interval, ensuring the system aligns with the desired state by performing tasks such as provisioning and deprovisioning resources, monitoring, failover, and recovery. The control loops are non-blocking, stateless, idempotent, and have an alerting mechanism for unhandled situations. Dragonfly Cloud's control loop design was influenced by Kubernetes but built to better fit the unique demands of their multi-cloud, multi-tenancy, platform-as-a-service architecture.