We are absolutely thrilled today to announce the graduation of Crossplane within the CNCF! This is a huge milestone for the project as it joins the ranks of other mature, production-ready CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Helm.
Graduation represents the highest level of maturity in the CNCF and signals that Crossplane is stable, reliable, and broadly deployed in many production environments. Originally created and open-sourced by Upbound, it’s been amazing to see how far Crossplane has come since we donated the project to the CNCF at the Sandbox level in 2020!
Built by the Community
This graduation accomplishment is a testament to an incredible community that has rallied around the vision of making cloud native control planes accessible to everyone. The growth of the Crossplane community has been remarkable. We now have over 3,000 people from more than 480 companies that have contributed to the project - that is a ton of people getting involved!
Compared to other projects, Crossplane ranks #13 out of 231 CNCF projects for number of PR authors, placing us in the top 10% of the CNCF. These aren't just faceless numbers—behind every contribution is a real person who decided to help make Crossplane better. Whether you contributed code, documentation, opened issues, or supported another user, you are a key part of this achievement.
Production-Ready and Battle-Tested
Crossplane is built on community engagement and that combined effort has enabled the project to power real production workloads.
We have over 70 public adopters, including organizations like Nike, Nokia, Grafana, NASA Science Cloud, Elastic, Akamai, SAP, and IBM. These organizations, and many others, trust Crossplane to manage their critical services at scale in production.
The project is also operated according to a robust vendor-neutral governance, completed two comprehensive security audits, achieved an OpenSSF Best Practices badge, and follows a mature release process with a well-defined LTS policy for over 100 total releases to date. Crossplane is definitely built as a project you can bet your cloud native software on.
Building for Long-Term Sustainability
Throughout the rigorous due diligence process for our graduation application, our sponsors on the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee provided thoughtful feedback on how we could strengthen the project's long-term sustainability. We took this guidance to heart and implemented several improvements to the project based on their recommendations.
We established a vendor-neutral community registry to host Crossplane packages at xpkg.crossplane.io and migrated critical release infrastructure to CNCF-owned resources, ensuring the project can continue thriving independently. We also rolled out clear policies for Community Extension Projects to help the community navigate the broad ecosystem of Crossplane extensions.
The result of this effort is that Crossplane is now a stronger and more resilient project. We have the infrastructure and governance to sustain the project for years to come. We are truly grateful for the expertise our TOC sponsors brought to the process—their guidance has made Crossplane better for the cloud native ecosystem.
Beyond Graduation
While graduation is a huge milestone, it isn’t the finish line. It's a recognition of how far we've come on this journey, but also a foundation for the future yet to come.
Thank you to every person who has contributed to Crossplane in any way and any team that has adopted the project—we truly appreciate our amazing community. We are also grateful to the CNCF for all the support they have provided the project over the years.
We're excited to continue building the future of cloud native control planes together. Join us in the Crossplane Slack community, star the project on GitHub, and follow us on Bluesky, X, or LinkedIn.
Here's to the next chapter of Crossplane! 🎉