.. _bright_staff:

Bright Staff

Bright Staff is Plano's memory-efficient, lightweight controller for agentic traffic. It sits inside the Plano data plane and makes real-time decisions about how prompts are handled, forwarded, and processed.

Rather than running a separate "model server" subsystem, Plano relies on Envoy's HTTP connection management and cluster subsystem to talk to different models and backends over HTTP(S). Bright Staff uses these primitives to:

• Inspect prompts, conversation state, and metadata.
• Decide which upstream model(s), tool backends, or APIs to call, and in what order.
• Coordinate retries, fallbacks, and traffic splitting across providers and models.

Plano is designed to run alongside your application servers in your cloud VPC, on-premises, or in local development. It does not require a GPU itself; GPUs live where your models are hosted (third-party APIs or your own deployments), and Plano reaches them via HTTP.

.. image:: /_static/img/plano-system-architecture.png :align: center :width: 40%