Crossplane turns 2 years old just ahead of v1.0 release!

Come join us to celebrate at the second Crossplane Community Day on Dec. 15th with an amazing lineup including Kelsey Hightower, Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, Bassam Tabbara, Brian Grant, and more -- register now for this free live virtual event!

It’s been an amazing year for the Crossplane community with tons of momentum and engagement as we collectively build towards an API-centric Control Plane future -- where everyone can define their own cloud platform to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid security pitfalls, and deliver apps faster.

Crossplane is now a CNCF project -- founded by the creators of Rook which became a graduated CNCF project earlier this year alongside Kubernetes itself, Prometheus, and Envoy. The community has rallied around Crossplane with diverse membership from AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud, RedHat, Equinix, IBM, Accenture, VSHN, Akirix, and more.

With over 10M+ downloads, 2,700+ GitHub stars, and 1,000+ Slack members it’s an exciting time to be part of the growing Crossplane community and there have been a ton of contributions we’d like to recognize. Community members have stepped up to be maintainers of sub-projects like crossplane/provider-aws that supports 3x more AWS cloud services vs. last year and lots more on the way!

We’re excited about how the community benefits from a converged effort around Crossplane and the joint work to adapt the AWS ACK and Azure ASO codegen pipelines to emit native Crossplane resources plus the use of stateless Terraform providers to accelerate coverage for the Long Tail -- targeting 100% Crossplane Provider coverage for all clouds and cloud services.

Crossplane API docs are now auto-generated by doc.crds.dev which has been integrated into cdk8s, so you can import Crossplane CRDs and compose cloud services in your language of choice (TypeScript, Python, Java) in addition to YAML -- all using the proven Kubernetes API.

Crossplane v1.0 is just around the corner shipping on Dec. 14th with final v1 APIs, leader election, Prometheus metrics for all binaries, enhanced platform configuration support and more!

To celebrate we’re hosting the second Crossplane Community Day on Dec. 15th with an amazing lineup including Kelsey Hightower, Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, Bassam Tabbara, Brian Grant, and more -- register now for this free live virtual event!

Roll your own PaaS with Crossplane

Provisioning the cloud services your apps need directly from Kubernetes and with GitOps workflows and Velero backup/restore compatibility is one of the core use cases Crossplane supports.

Furthermore using Crossplane as an API-centric Control Plane to provision and manage complete platform Configurations like the open source Multi-cloud Kubernetes Reference Platform enables you to deploy complete environments with clusters, networking, security, and a catalog of cloud services for your app teams to self serve and deploy their apps faster.

InfoQ: building your own PaaS with Crossplane
InfoQ did an excellent writeup in August on building your own PaaS with Crossplane after sitting down with Bassam Tabbara, a Crossplane founder, to discuss building application platforms that span multiple cloud vendors and on-premise infrastructure.

"Although Kubernetes does not provide a full platform-as-a-service (PaaS)-like experience out of the box, the combination of a well-defined API, clear abstractions, and comprehensive extension points make this a perfect foundational component on which to build upon." - Daniel Bryant

TNS Context: Rolling your own PaaS with Crossplane
The New Stack hosted a podcast in September where we covered rolling your own PaaS with Crossplane so organizations can build their own customized set of platform services, where developers can draw from a self-serve portal the building blocks they need — be they containerized applications or third-party cloud services, and have the resulting app run uniformly in multiple environments.

“The need for control planes, such as [CNCF’s] open source Crossplane, comes from organizations that want to build their own private Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), like a Heroku or Cloud Foundry, but they are opinionated towards their own specific requirements” - Joab Jackson

Crossplane is a unified control plane that integrates with existing tools
Janakiram MSV listed Crossplane as a prime example of how Kubernetes is becoming the Universal Control Plane for Distributed Applications in October where he covers how Crossplane acts as a bridge between Kubernetes, traditional workloads, and managed services in the public cloud -- and declaring external cloud resources with idiomatic Kubernetes YAML, along with native Kubernetes applications.

“Crossplane aims to standardize infrastructure and application management using the same API-centric, declarative configuration and automation approach pioneered by Kubernetes. It is a unified control plane that integrates seamlessly with existing tools and systems.” - Janakiram MSV

Platform Configuration support in v0.13 replaces Stacks from v0.8
Crossplane v0.13 was released in October with the 1.0 API release candidate and new platform Configuration support -- the successor to Stacks introduced in v0.8 and v0.9.

Around the same time the folks at Upbound released an open source AWS Reference Platform for Kubernetes & Data Services that shows how you can build your own internal cloud platform with Crossplane.

The result is app teams can provision the infrastructure they need with a single YAML file alongside Deployments and Services using existing tools and workflows -- including tools like kubectl and Flux to consume your platform's self-service APIs.

A platform Configuration defines the self-service APIs and classes-of-service for each API:

CompositeResourceDefinitions (XRDs) define the platform's self-service APIs - e.g. CompositePostgreSQLInstance.
Compositions offer the classes-of-service supported for each self-service API - e.g. Standard, Performance, Replicated.

KubeCon NA 2020 Demo
Checkout the demo we shared at KubeCon NA 2020 and with Alex Williams on The New Stack Makers podcast to see Platform Configurations in action!

Crossplane v1.0 is just around the corner!
Crossplane v0.14 was released in November and paves the way for Crossplane v1.0 to ship on December 14th with:

final v1 APIs for the core Crossplane Composition - led by @negz and @muvaf
overhauled Package Manager - led by @hasheddan
leader election - contributed by @khos2ow
Prometheus metrics for all binaries
enhanced platform configuration support and more!

Crossplane Maintainers @negz, @hasheddan, @muvaf, and @jbw976 will all be speaking at Crossplane Community Day, so register now and listen to them live on December 15th!

Accelerating Crossplane Provider Coverage

We’re excited about how the community benefits from a converged effort around Crossplane and service operators like AWS ACK and Azure Service Operator (ASO) who are adapting their codegen pipelines to emit native Crossplane resources for provider-aws and provider-azure, so the cloud providers can own the respective generated Crossplane resources -- and you can use Crossplane to compose and publish your own infrastructure abstractions to the k8s API without writing code.

Crossplane Resource Model (XRM)
We love the Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) and what it has done for open source control planes, and we’ve found that the Crossplane community benefits from an even more opinionated API - we think of this as the Crossplane Resource Model, or XRM.

Under this superset of the KRM things like credentials, status conditions, deletion policies, and references to other resources work the same no matter which provider you use. This prevents users having to build subtly different mental models (and software!) when they need to work with multiple providers - for example pairing provider-gcpwith provider-sql, or provider-helm.

AWS ACK code generation of Crossplane provider-aws resources
The AWS ACK codegen of Crossplane provider-aws resources has been spearheaded by @jaypipes and @muvaf to emit native Crossplane resources that shipped in the Crossplane provider-awsv0.15.0 release, including 12 new API Gateway managed resources generated by ACK.

This greatly accelerates AWS provider coverage for a total of 56 AWS cloud services supported in Crossplane provider-aws and more on the way!

Azure ASO code generation of Crossplane provider-azure resources
The Azure ASO codegen of Crossplane provider-azure resources has been driven by @matthchr @Dave_Fellows @kasey and the NZ team (@babbageclunk @theunrepentantgeek @porges @frodopwns).

Checkout the latest work in progress here!

Accelerating Crossplane Provider coverage for the Long Tail
To accelerate support for cloud providers that don't have an open source codegen pipeline, @kasey is leading an effort to generate Crossplane providers on top of the stateless Terraform providers.

Checkout the very early set of generated resources here!

Towards 100% coverage of all cloud and cloud services
These are major milestones towards 100% Crossplane provider coverage of all clouds and cloud services in Crossplane and we’re excited about all the community involvement to build Crossplane providers:

Checkout the live discussion in the Crossplane #providers Slack channel and say hi, we’d love to hear from you!

@jaypipes, @matthchr, and @kasey will all be giving talks on code generation of Crossplane providers at Crossplane Community Day, so register now and listen to them live on December 15th!

Amazing community momentum and engagement!

The growth of the community and convergence around Crossplane as an API-centric control plane for application and infrastructure management has been amazing to witness. There are too many community contributions to mention all of them but we’ll do our best to cover the highlights. Many thanks for everyone’s efforts and hard work bringing Crossplane to v1.0 and growing an ecosystem around it!

Crossplane as a cornerstone in a next-gen DevOps platform
In the v0.6 timeframe (early 2020) VHSN AG, a Zurich-based DevOps company, announced their use of Crossplane as a cornerstone in their next-gen hosted DevOps platform.

Tobias Brunner, VSHN co-founder and TechLead, will be giving a talk at Crossplane Community Day, and in their original announcementdescribed the core driver for why they adopted Crossplane:

“After several weeks of evaluation, we’re excited to be using Crossplane as a cornerstone in our next-gen hosted DevOps product. Crossplane is an extensible open-source platform that adds declarative cloud service provisioning and management to the Kubernetes API with excellent support for GitOps-style continuous deployments for cloud-native apps that is at the heart of the next-gen offering of VSHN.” - Tobias Brunner

We’d also like to give a shoutout to @srueg from VSHN for his contributions to provider-sql!

The Binding Status (TBS) livestream
At the same time, Crossplane maintainer @hasheddan put the The Binding Status (TBS) livestream into high gear and brought together leaders in the Kubernetes community to show how Crossplane could be used in conjunction with their projects including k3sup, Okteto, Cluster API, Linkerd, OpenFaaS, OPA, Knative, Velero, NATS, Falco, Packet, Seccomp operator, Sourcegraph, and many more.

Thank you to everyone who participated and we’re looking forward to many more awesome TBS episodes going forward!

RedHat using Crossplane to provision cloud services in OpenShift
@RedHatOfficial! and @krishchow published an excellent blog post on how to provision cloud services in OpenShift clusters using Crossplanethat expanded on the previous work we announced back in May 2020.

AWS Provider coverage up 3x since last year & a new maintainer!
@krishchow has also made significant contributions to Crossplane provider-aws along with @janwillies, @enderv, @kferrone, @jbrawdy, @sahil-lakhwani and many others. Many thanks to all who contributed to provider-aws and getting it to 3x the supported resources vs. last year!

We’d like to give a special shout out to @krishchow who has stepped up to be a crossplane/provider-aws maintainer -- congrats and thank you!

Microsoft and Alibaba joined the Crossplane community
Microsoft and Alibaba joined the Crossplane community in May as part of our joint work around making Crossplane the Kubernetes implementation of the Open Application Model (OAM) in the v0.11 release based on a new v1alpha2 version of the OAM specification that unified the Crossplane and OAM approaches to managing infrastructure and applications.

Checkout The New Stack writeup covering our KubeCon EU 2020 talkon using OAM and Crossplane Composition to deploy apps faster.

Thanks for all the contributions from @wonderflow @captainrow-hy @ryanshang-oss, @hongchaodeng @zzxwill @negz @hasheddan @artursourza (who also added Azure CosmosDB support) @resouer and many more!

Awesome auto-generated API docs with doc.crds.dev
Crossplane uses doc.crds.dev, created by @hasheddan, to crawl GitHub repos and auto-generate API docs for any discovered CRDs. It’s really come a long way in a short time and recently got a huge UI upgrade from @RichiCoder1 including dark mode, collapsable sections, copy buttons, and more -- super cool!

Import into cdk8s and compose with your language of choice
AWS cdk8s lead @eladb has recently merged support to import CRDs from doc.crds.dev, that enables you to:

compose Crossplane resources in TypeScript, Python, or Java
generate YAML with cdk8s synth
apply it with kubectl.

@eladb and @prasek will be giving a talk at Crossplane Community Day on this plus future directions on running cdk8s behind the Kubernetes API and adding first-class multi-language support to Crossplane!

Crossplane joins the larger CNCF community!
Crossplane joined the CNCF as a Sandbox Project in late May. The team of contributors has worked incredibly hard to grow the community and mature the project, so this is a great validation that Crossplane has reached a new level of maturity. This especially feels like well deserved timing as the project is really hitting its stride and has started to find a solid fit and genuine demand in the ecosystem by enabling users to:

Provision infrastructure declaratively using the Kubernetes API
Publish their own declarative infrastructure API without code
Run and deploy applications alongside infrastructure

It really does take a village to make an open source project successful. We’re grateful and humbled by all the amazing contributions and the warm community reception. Crossplane v1.0 is almost to the finish line and we’re excited to share what we’ve been up to at Crossplane Community Day!

Crossplane Community Day - December 15th

Recap from Previous Crossplane Community Day

Checkout the full agenda and register now!

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: