Self-hosted deployment architecture
KnotRoute separates the data plane from the management plane.
Data plane
Section titled “Data plane”Nodes, relays, Beacon bootstrap, circuits, distributed descriptors, rendezvous and sidecars carry or enable actual overlay traffic.
Management plane
Section titled “Management plane”Control and Agents provide inventory, deployments, onboarding and operational visibility. Existing data-plane traffic must continue if Control is unavailable.
Production baseline
Section titled “Production baseline”A practical starting point is a non-default Network ID, 2+ Beacon endpoints, several stable relays across independent hosts, HTTPS for Beacon/Control, persistent identity volumes, service-identity backups and an external synthetic .knot check.
Small deployments
Section titled “Small deployments”Control is optional. A small network can use manual configuration, Beacons and sidecars directly.
Larger deployments
Section titled “Larger deployments”Control + Agents reduce configuration drift and make deployment/onboarding repeatable without becoming mandatory traffic coordinators.