What Is Data Plane?

The data plane is like the plane of a car. It's the part you see when you look at the outside of your car. If you're inside your car, it's not visible to you, but the data plane is still there: it's what's going on underneath your feet, so to speak. So why do we need this concept? Well, it helps us understand how networks work! When you send an email or browse the web, all that information is being transmitted through a network infrastructure, which means it's traveling over something called "packets." A packet is just a small amount of data sent from one place to another. When you send an email or browse the web and click "send," what happens is that your computer sends a bunch of these packets to another device (like an email server), which then sends them back to whoever requested them in the first place (like Google). The whole process is invisible to us, but if we could see into our computers' guts, we'd see these packets traveling through what we call "the data plane." The data plane is also comprehended as the user plane, the forwarding plane or the carrier plane. The data plane is the one you can't find. It's been lost in the battle of the user plane vs. the control plane, but it's still there. It's just hiding somewhere in your computer, and it's too hard to find because it's not on your screen. The data plane is the function of a computer network that handles all user traffic. It's basically everything that happens between two endpoints, for example, when you send an email to your friend. This is in contrast to the control plane, which handles things like routing and signaling. Think of it as the brain of your network: it tells all your devices where they need to go and what they need to do when they get there. The data plane isn't just for sending emails and browsing websites; it also includes file sharing and streaming video!