Whether built for evaluation or to host production applications, when managing a small Deis cluster (three to five nodes), it is reasonable to accept the platform's default behavior wherein the Control Plane, Data Plane, and Router Mesh are not isolated from one another. (See :ref:`architecture`.) This means Control Plane components such as the :ref:`controller` or :ref:`database` will be eligible to run on any node, as will the Router Mesh and the Data Plane components such as :ref:`logspout`, :ref:`publisher`, and deployed applications.
In larger clusters however, nodes are more easily thought of as a commodity. Operators may scale clusters out to meet demand or in to conserve resources. In such cases, it is beneficial to isolate the Control Plane, which has no significant need to scale (and optionally, the Router Mesh) to a small, fixed number of nodes that are exempt from such scaling events. This eliminates the possibility that Control Plane components running on a decommissioned node will experience downtime as they are rescheduled. Additionally, this reserves the resources of a large (and possibly dynamic) pool of nodes for the workloads that are most likely to scale-- applications.