Crossplane

Crossplane is a cloud native control plane framework developed by Upbound. According to the vendor, it enables organizations to build their own platforms with control planes, facilitating the orchestration of applications and infrastructure across multiple environments. The product is designed for companies of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises, and is utilized by professionals including Cloud Architects, DevOps Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers, IT Managers, and Software Developers. It caters to various industries such as Technology, Finance, Healthcare, Retail, and Manufacturing.

Key Features

According to the vendor, Crossplane offers the following key features:

Declarative configuration: Crossplane allows users to build a control plane using Kubernetes-style declarative and API-driven configuration and management for applications and infrastructure. The vendor claims that this approach ensures self-healing applications and infrastructure, automatically correcting any drift and reducing the complexity of toolchains and deployment pipelines.

Unify application and infrastructure configuration and deployment: The vendor states that Crossplane enables the coexistence of application and infrastructure configuration in the same control plane. This eliminates the need for managing separate toolchains and deployment pipelines, allowing users to conveniently manage both application and infrastructure resources from a single control plane.

One source of truth for infrastructure configuration and setup: According to the vendor, control planes built with Crossplane integrate with CI/CD pipelines, enabling teams to create, track, and approve changes using GitOps best practices. The vendor claims that infrastructure configuration and setup can be managed through version control, providing a single source of truth for infrastructure changes. GitOps practices ensure that infrastructure changes are auditable, traceable, and can be rolled back if needed.

Automate operational tasks with reconciling controllers: The vendor explains that control planes built with Crossplane consist of multiple controllers responsible for the entire lifecycle of a resource. Each resource's controller handles provisioning, health, scaling, failover, and actively responds to external changes that deviate from the desired configuration. The vendor states that reconciling controllers automate operational tasks, ensuring that resources are always in the desired state.

Built with high levels of extensibility: According to the vendor, Crossplane is designed with extension in mind, allowing users to build their ideal control plane. Providers and Configurations extend Crossplane to orchestrate new kinds of applications and infrastructure. The vendor claims that Crossplane leverages Kubernetes patterns, making it easily extensible by adding custom APIs and controllers.