Plano

Plano is an open-source, Envoy-based AI-native proxy and data plane for agentic applications, open-sourced by Katanemo in April 2026 and almost immediately acquired by DigitalOcean. It differentiates from conventional LLM gateways by treating agent orchestration, multi-provider routing, guardrails, and observability as first-class out-of-process primitives rather than in-framework libraries -- a legitimate architectural bet that reduces coupling to AI frameworks. However, the acquisition raises real strategic risk: the product's roadmap is now subject to DigitalOcean's priorities, and the long-term commitment to cloud-neutrality or self-hosted deployment is uncertain. No published enterprise pricing, no named design-partner customers, no disclosed compliance certifications, and a very short production track record (the project was open-sourced only in April 2026) make this a watch-and-pilot choice rather than a buy for risk-averse enterprises today.