Accelerating Crossplane provider coverage with ACK and Azure code generation!

Phil Prasek -

The Crossplane community is making excellent progress towards code generating native Crossplane providers and we'd like to give a special shout out to @jaypipes (AWS) and @Dave_Fellows (Azure) for their continued efforts as we jointly adapt the ACK and Azure Service Operator (ASO) code gen pipelines to emit Crossplane resources for provider-aws and provider-azure! This is a major milestone towards 100% coverage of all clouds and cloud services in Crossplane.

We're excited about how the community benefits from a converged effort around Crossplane and service operators like AWS ACK and Azure Service Operator with the cloud providers owning the generated Crossplane resources, so you can use Crossplane to compose and publish your own infrastructure abstractions to the k8s API without writing code.

Our roadmap includes 100% coverage for all cloud Providers, so you can compose all the cloud service primitives you need in Crossplane Compositions.

ACK code generation of Crossplane provider-aws

The Crossplane provider-aws v0.15.0 release that went out yesterday includes the first batch of ACK generated Crossplane provider-aws API types including 12 new API Gateway managed resources generated by ACK. This effort will greatly accelerate the coverage of AWS resources in the Crossplane ecosystem.

There's a lot of momentum on this and the collaboration between Muvaffak Onus and Jay Pipes has doc.crds.dev showing we're up to 53 AWS resources supported today and more on the way!

This work is an evoluation of the prototype that Jay Pipes (ACK lead) whipped up a few weeks ago that Jay recently mentioned:

The ongoing collaboration between the AWS ACK and Crossplane projects was summed up nicely by Jay:

The community benefits from a converged effort here (ACK + Crossplane) with ACK owning the generated Crossplane k8s resources for AWS, so you can use Crossplane to compose and publish your own infrastructure abstractions to the k8s API without writing code.

ASO code gen of Crossplane provider-azure

The Azure ASO team (@davefellows @matthchr @babbageclunk @theunrepentantgeek @porges @frodopwns) is also adapting their codegen pipeline to generate Crossplane resources.

@frodopwns did a nice job pointing out the nature of the Azure ASO and Crossplane collaboration:

You can follow along with the work that @mattchr and the Azure ASO team is doing here: ASO code gen of Crossplane provider-azure!

Code generation for clouds without codegen pipelines

To accelerate support for cloud providers that don't have an open source codegen pipeline, we're generating Crossplane Providers on top of the stateless Terraform providers.

Checkout the very early set of generated resources here!

Learn more

Our roadmap includes 100% coverage for all cloud Providers, so you can compose all the cloud service primitives you need in Crossplane Compositions.

You can follow along with the links below or drop us a note in the Crossplane #providers channel to learn more:

Crossplane v1.0 is just around the corner

v1.0.0 Release Candidate (Dec 2020)

  • Prometheus metrics for all binaries
  • Claim update propagation to its underlying composite resource
  • Bi-directional Composition patching for status
  • Revision support for incremental Composition upgrades
  • Use Composition members to fill a connection secret
  • Composition validation webhooks
  • Auto dependency resolution for packages - install providers
  • All core APIs to v1/v1beta1
  • Code Generation of Providers (initial set of generated resources)
  • Native AWS, Azure provider resources.
  • Terraform-based provider resources.

Next / Under Consideration

  • Code Generation of Providers (100% coverage)
  • First-class multi-language support for Compositions and Configurations
  • Managed resources can accept an array of resource references for enhanced cross-resource reference (CRR) / dependencysupport.
  • Per-namespace mapping of IRSA and workload identity for finer grained infra permissions in multi-tenant clusters
  • Additional conversion strategies for XRDs with multiple versions of an XR
  • Conversion webhooks to support installing multiple API versions
  • CustomComposition support for use with cdk8s sidecar, TYY, and others

Checkout the following to learn more:

KubeCon NA 2020 - November 17-20th

We'd love to see you at any of our upcoming virtual KubeCon NA talks November 17-20, so register now if you haven't already, checkout the schedule below, and our KubeCon Pre-event Livestream.

Drop by the Crossplane booth to chat LIVE with the team on Zoom about how you can compose your own cloud APIs and watch the Crossplane overview video below!

Please note all times are in Eastern Time (UTC–05:00)!

Wednesday Nov. 18th
Crossplane Project Office Hours - Join Here (Zoom)
Crossplane Maintainers
03:00 PM EST

Managing Apps and Cloud Resources with a Unified Approach in Kubernetes
Jianbo Sun, Alibaba & Jared Watts, Upbound
4:55 pm EST

Friday Nov. 20th
Building an Enterprise Infrastructure Control Plane on Kubernetes
Daniel Mangum, Upbound & Steven Borrelli, Mastercard
5:05 pm EST

Get involved!

We're excited to see the continual growth of the Crossplane community and would love for you to get involved. Whether you are a developer, user, or just interested in what we're up to, feel free to join us via one of the following methods: