A few months ago Crossplane hosted Control Plane Day with Crossplane event. The event was a smashing success with hundreds of attendees and some outstanding talks from both maintainers and users.
I was lucky enough to moderate a panel with some of the Crossplane maintainers to see what they're working on and what makes them excited about Crossplane and where we're going with the project.
The panel included Bob Haddleton from Nokia, Ezgi Demirel, Jared Watts, and Nic Cope from Upbound.
Composition Functions
Nic spent some time talking about why he thinks the new Crossplane Composition Functions capabilities are so exciting and powerful for anyone building control planes with Crossplane.
External Secret Store
Ezgi gave us some insights into the External Secret Store feature she's been working on. The External Secrets Store allows Crossplane and Crossplane providers to access usernames, passwords, or any other confidential information through secure secret stores like Vault or any other external secret store that supports gRPC calls. It's still early days for the External Secret Store features but it's a powerful extension that lots of folks in the community have been asking for.
Moving from Terraform to Crossplane
Bob is not only a maintainer but also a Crossplane user. Bob talks about the platforms he's building at Nokia that rely on Crossplane. Bob also describes his Crossplane journey and moving from Terraform to Crossplane with Provider Terraform. Bob noted “[Crossplane] has revolutionized, in my view, the way we maintain and develop environments.”
Troubleshooting
Jared, who spends a lot of time working directly with Crossplane users and helping them build and troubleshoot control planes, details some of the challenges users have trying to adopt Crossplane and how we're improving the user experience to make Crossplane easier for everyone.
What's ahead for Crossplane
I also got to ask everyone what's coming up on the Crossplane roadmap that they are excited about, including Composition Functions, moving Crossplane features from alpha and beta to GA and some of the major performance improvements that have been implemented over the last few releases.
Finally, Jared and I discussed one of our most asked questions, how Crossplane relates to Terraform and where Kubernetes is required or how Crossplane can be used outside or independent of Kubernetes.
Go check out the full Q&A session and all of the other talks from the Control Plane Days event.