Welcome IBM to the Crossplane Community

Phil Prasek -

Guest post by Paolo Dettori, Chris Bailey and John Ponzo at IBM.

Today IBM is pleased to announce that it is joining the Crossplane community and releasing an experimental Crossplane Provider for IBM Cloud. Over 85 IBM cloud services can now be composed into your own cloud APIs with Crossplane and consumed from theKubernetes API using kubectl, deployment pipelines, and GitOps workflows.

The future of hybrid multi-cloud environments

Enterprises are increasingly building hybrid multi-cloud strategies, utilizing both private and public clouds (IDC, 2020), and with the vast majority of enterprises working with two or more providers (Gartner, 2019). We see Crossplane as a vital component in the future of hybrid multi-cloud environments because of the consistency and portability it provides across infrastructure and cloud environments.

Solving portability and consistency challenges

We in IBM, with our partners in Red Hat, are providing Red Hat OpenShift and the IBM Cloud Paks as the portability layer across hybrid multi-cloud environments. These provide a consistent Kubernetes platform for containerized, cloud-native applications, across environments and cloud providers. However portability and consistency challenges still persist because any given cloud platform extends beyond Kubernetes itself. The use of capabilities such as managed services (eg, databases, datastores and messaging services), load-balancing and proxy services, identity and access management, and observability all add friction and barriers to application portability.

Over 85 IBM Cloud services supported

We see Crossplane as providing the ability to extend the consistency layer for these additional services, and why today we’re taking the first step on that journey by releasing the experimental release of the IBM Cloud Provider to enable the provisioning and management of IBM Cloud infrastructure and services from the Crossplane control plane.

The provider currently provides the following features:

  • Provision and manage 85+ hosted services and their credentials from the IBM Cloud Catalog
  • Import existing IBM Cloud services into the provider
  • Use Go templating to shape credentials for the requirements of applications.

Whats next

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking to enhance the provider with additional IBM Cloud APIs including IBM Cloud Databases and IAM, and maintaining API compatibility of the provider using code generation against the OpenAPI specs from the IBM Cloud Services.

Learn more

You can find the IBM Cloud Provider in the Crossplane Contributions organization on GitHub here: https://github.com/crossplane-contrib/provider-ibm-cloud

Come join us for our talk at at the second Crossplane Community Day on Dec. 15th along 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!

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: