A World Without Configuration Chaos: The Configuration Control Plane
Imagine a world where you can answer, with absolute confidence, the critical question: “What is the full impact of this change?”
A world where configuration isn’t a source of fear, but a source of reliability. Where outages from “simple” changes are a thing of the past, and audit-readiness isn’t a scramble, but a default state. Where your teams, developers, operators, security engineers, and even AI, can all collaborate safely on a single, provable source of truth.
Many of you have been part of helping us build CUE, a powerful open source technology, to address the multi-billion-dollar blind spot that is configuration management.
Today, we are announcing CUE Labs, the company dedicated to this mission. We are taking CUE to the next level by building the Configuration Control Plane, designed to bring order and predictability to this critical domain.
The Configuration Chaos Spiral
Configuration is the very connective tissue of our systems. It’s the multi-disciplinary coordination exercise that translates human intent and policy into live behavior. It’s not just YAML files in a repository driving a deployment pipeline; it’s the firewall rules defining your security posture, the compliance policies governing your data, and even the dosage limits in a hospital setting.
It’s the critical logic impacting everyone from engineers and architects to management, defining how your organization runs.
In reality, this connective tissue is in a state of chaos. And this chaos is not constant, it’s accelerating.
As we build more systems, their interconnectedness grows. As we adopt more tools, our configuration becomes scattered across incompatible file formats, schemas, policy engines, and templating languages. As compliance and security requirements increase, the burden of proof becomes heavier. The result is a chaos spiral: a tangled web where no one can see the full picture, and everyone is afraid to make a change.
Why Now? The Tipping Point
This accelerating chaos has reached a tipping point, amplified by the very tools we’re building to manage it. The rise of generative AI, a powerful “intuition machine”, is the perfect example. AI can generate configuration at incredible speed, but it lacks the logical rigor to do so safely. It’s an amplifier for our existing problems, threatening to multiply our chaos at machine speed unless we first impose order.
We can no longer afford to treat configuration as a low-level chore. We must treat it as a first-class, strategic asset.
Toward a Configuration Control Plane
Today, many of you use open source CUE to validate configurations, enforce policies, and DRY up boilerplate. (If you’re new to CUE or curious, you can get started here).
But CUE alone only goes so far. It doesn’t connect to your workflows. It doesn’t integrate with your pull requests. It doesn’t, by itself, let you answer that critical question: “What is the full impact of this change?”
This is the gap we are filling. At CUE Labs, we are building a complete Configuration Control Plane with CUE at its core: a central system that elevates configuration from a scattered liability to a managed, strategic asset.
The Configuration Control Plane connects the technical realities of configuration with the strategic needs of the organization. Its value is measured in two ways:
The Strategic Value - The “Why”
- Drastically Reduce Operational Risk: By making correctness a default property, you eliminate entire classes of costly, reputation-damaging outages and security vulnerabilities.
- Achieve Provable Compliance: Move from hoping you’re compliant to knowing you are. A control plane provides a single, provable, and auditable source of truth for all policy, making audit-readiness a simple report, not a fire drill.
- Contain Catastrophic Costs: The biggest configuration costs are the outages that cost millions. By managing configuration systematically, you turn unpredictable exposure into measurable, containable risk.
- Unlock Team Potential: Free your teams from the drudgery and fear of manual configuration checks. When changes are safe and predictable, your engineers can focus on innovation and delivering value specific to your organization’s mission.
The Technical Capability - The “How”
- Seamlessly integrate into your existing workflows. The Configuration Control Plane will meet you where you are, slotting into your configurations, platforms, and tools. Edit a YAML file, create a pull request, and know the full impact of that change.
- Unify your fragmented landscape by ingesting and composing configuration from any source, including your existing YAML and JSON, without a “big bang” migration.
- Make correctness the default by validating every change against the complete, unified view of your configuration.
- Preview the impact of every change instantly, bringing safety and finally answering “what if?”.
- Create a trusted source that guarantees safe collaboration between humans and machines, and scales for the future.
CUE & CUE Labs: An Open-Core Partnership
At the core of this vision is open source CUE. CUE’s logical engine and unification model are uniquely designed to manage complexity at scale.
CUE Labs is the company founded by CUE’s creator, Marcel van Lohuizen (co-creator of Google’s Borg), and backed by a team with deep experience in large-scale systems. We are the stewards of the open source CUE project.
Our mission is an open-core flywheel: We are the full-time team accelerating the core open source CUE project, and in parallel, we are building the Configuration Control Plane that operationalizes CUE’s power at an enterprise scale, providing the integrations and workflows organizations need.
To execute this vision, we are proud to be supported by leading investors including Sequoia, OSS Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and Founders Fund. We’ve been building quietly, and today we are thrilled to share our work.
The Journey Ahead: From Chaos to Clarity
The era of treating configuration as an afterthought is over. It’s time to turn our industry’s biggest blind spot into its greatest source of reliability. This is a new chapter, and we invite you to join us.
Join our Launch Event with Kelsey Hightower
Register for our live, online conversation with industry luminary and CUE Labs advisor, Kelsey Hightower, on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. We will dive deep into this vision and explore the future of configuration.
Register here for the CUE Labs launch event with Kelsey Hightower
Learn how the Configuration Control Plane makes your system more reliable
If the challenges of configuration chaos resonate with your experience, we want to hear from you, and explore how the Configuration Control Plane can help.
