Powered by Crossplane, Upbound is the easiest place to build, deploy, and manage cloud platforms using control planes. Many organizations find themselves embarking on similar journeys; Whether it's building “golden paths”, “launch zones”, or “cloud infrastructure self-service”, organizations are beginning to build their own internal developer platforms above the clouds–and they’re using control planes to power them. With our managed control planes your organization can now operate control planes at scale. Upbound provides platform engineers with centralized control, governance and stability while providing developers the freedom of self service.

Managed Control Planes (MCPs) are Crossplane control plane environments that are fully managed by Upbound. Upbound manages the underlying lifecycle of infrastructure hosting the MCP, auto-scaling of the infrastructure, and the maintenance of core Crossplane components.

Upbound’s Managed Control Planes were built from the ground up for performance, scalability, and full lifecycle management. MCPs can scale to thousands of CRDs, allowing you to use control planes to manage resources across as many cloud services as you desire. Upbound is built for the fleet-scale demands of modern enterprises, who are using control planes for different environments, teams, business units, and customers. MCPs make it practical for organizations to successfully operate tens–or even hundreds–of control planes.

Control planes create and manage the lifecycle of resources. Control planes constantly check that the intended resources exist, report when the intended state doesn’t match reality and act to make things right.

Control planes are the next evolution in infrastructure management and developer productivity. With a control plane, operators can standardize infrastructure management and provisioning across all their environments and vendors. Kubernetes pioneered the management of infrastructure and services with an API driven approach, which is the basis of the control plane. Kubernetes' true 'superpower' is that it can become the control plane for any resource, not just the containers. The next logical application of these ideas is to use Kubernetes as a universal control plane which manages containers, VMs, serverless, and all of the infrastructure they connect to. The Kubernetes control plane can serve as a foundation to enable a universal control plane, which is what the open source Crossplane project is all about. Crossplane standardizes infrastructure and application management using the same API-centric, declarative configuration and automation approach pioneered by Kubernetes. It provides a consistent API across a diverse set of vendors resulting in a uniform experience for managing resources - and provides a really clear contract between what the platform teams offer and what the dev teams want to consume.

Upbound, powered by open source Crossplane, is the easiest place to build, deploy, and manage cloud platforms using control planes. Any enterprise looking to simplify and accelerate cloud native operations and empower their developers should try Upbound.

Today, every enterprise needs to become more agile and deliver software faster. Fundamental to this is the ability to rapidly provision infrastructure so developers can work more efficiently. Both platform teams and developers are frustrated by how many tickets, meetings and approval are required to deploy and scale infrastructure in today’s multi-cloud world. Upbound reduces the amount of friction, time and cost associated with this process by delivering a unified, self-service approach to provisioning cloud services and infrastructure using the same API-centric, declarative configuration and automation pioneered by Kubernetes.

Across industries, organizations are building their own cloud platform consisting of a combination of on-premises infrastructure and cloud vendors. Currently, Kubernetes is being used as the foundation for many cloud native platforms. Although Kubernetes does not provide a full 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.

Upbound provides a consistent API across a diverse set of vendors resulting in a uniform experience for managing resources and provides a really clear contract between what the platform teams offer and what the dev teams want to consume. Benefits from our approach include:

• Platform teams can assemble infrastructure from multiple vendors and expose higher level self-service APIs for application teams to consume without having to write any code.
• Developers can self-service what they need and it automatically adheres to their organization's policies, permissions and quotas. Enterprises can innovate faster with a modern and automated, self-service operations strategy.

Crossplane is based on the declarative management engine of Kubernetes, and borrows heavily from it. Crossplane uses the Kubernetes API server (kube-apiserver), etcd, and a few of the Kubernetes controllers. Crossplane can run on-top of an existing Kubernetes cluster without changes.

Despite the similarities, Crossplane should not be confused with Kubernetes. The two operate at different levels and solve different problems. Kubernetes is a container orchestrator and is responsible for managing containers, pods, nodes, and storage volumes. Crossplane is a cross-cloud orchestrator and manages databases, message queues, buckets, data pipelines, etc. directly on-top of cloud providers.

Crossplane does not require that applications deploy or use containers at all. You can use Crossplane without doing anything with containers. However, because most cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes services, Crossplane can provision and manage full Kubernetes clusters as well.

By adopting the Kubernetes architecture and many of its concepts and principles, we hope that Crossplane will be instantly familiar to the cloud native community.