In this latest batch of updates, we showcase the new provider management experiences now available on Upbound, newly polished flows in the Console, and how you can use Upbound to drive the creation of other Upbound infrastructure. It’s turtles all the way down. Let’s dive in!

New provider management experience

In June, Upbound released our “Provider Families” which are groups of providers that are more granularly organized by service, reducing bloat and improving performance for Crossplane users. Instead of needing to install a large monolithic provider containing hundreds of custom resource definitions (CRDs) for a given cloud service provider, users are able to install just the subset of services that they actually plan to use in their Crossplane-powered platform.

One trend we have seen as a result of this shift is that platform teams building with Crossplane have replaced their usage of a single monolithic Official Provider with a set of 5 or more service-scoped providers representing the CRDs they actually need. Users have asked for a way to able to quickly assess the health of a larger number of providers installed in a given control plane, as well as create and manage all of their associated ProviderConfigs.

Upbound’s latest release includes a new, dedicated section for Crossplane Provider management within the control plane explorer. From within a single experience, you can assess the health of all of your installed providers, view version information, and access provider package details in the Upbound Marketplace. In the case of service-scoped providers, they are grouped together within the UI along with the ProviderConfigs that they share for greater ease of management.

You can also conveniently create, edit, or delete ProviderConfigs from within this new Provider tab for Upbound Official Providers (or any other Crossplane provider offering OIDC support).

Streamlined configuration creation flow

Previously, Upbound offered two separate flows for creating a new configuration from our curated gallery of options, or “starting from scratch” to build a custom configuration from the ground up. We’ve now streamlined these experiences into a single screen with just two steps: choosing the repository that will serve as the git source for your configuration, and selecting a Configuration or the scratch template that you’ll clone into your new repository.

Declaratively create managed control planes

We introduced the Controlplane resource to provider-upbound, allowing you to use a managed control plane to drive the creation and configuration management of other managed control planes in your Upbound account. Read the documentation to learn how you can use this new feature to declaratively create new control planes alongside other Upbound-related infrastructure.

Improvements & Fixes

• Consolidated the existing Portal and GitOps tabs in the control plane explorer into a single Self Service section that includes a link out to new docs on how to integrate your control plane with Argo or Flux
• Fixed a bug that caused the configuration version displayed in the control plane dashboard to incorrectly appear as the latest version for some users
• Fixed a bug that caused the hyperlink to a configuration’s source repository to be broken in the configuration list
• Fixed a bug that cause Upbound OIDC to fail to refresh tokens, causing a loss of connectivity for the control plane to the external service

If you have feedback, a feature you’d like to see, or want to chat with the Product team, you can find us in the #Upbound channel of the Crossplane community slack.

What’s Next?

With Crossplane and Upbound, you can build an internal developer platform to control and simplify the deployment process for your organization. Register for “Two of the Biggest Promises of the Cloud Can Now Be Realized!” on August 30 at 8am PT now to learn more about how you can offer Cluster-as-a-Service, Network-as-a-Service, and Database-as-a-Service to your internal teams using Upbound.

On behalf of the Upbound team,

Craig D. Wilhite