This session originally occurred at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2024 in Paris, hosted by the CNCF. It is posted and lives on their YouTube channel here. How Crossplane is Accelerating Your Cloud Native Control Plane Journey | Project Lightning Talk We've listened to all the feedback from the community about how it can be challenging to get started with Crossplane, so in recent releases we've invested heavily into improving the developer experience and making it quicker and easier to successfully create a cloud native control plane and have it running reliably in production. We will start the tour by showing off the new init command, through which you can rapidly initialise a new Crossplane Function, Provider, or Configuration project based on common templates. Using post-init hooks to continue the journey, we will customise our Function to start capturing the unique requirements of our control plane. We'll then start the local development cycle using the render command to execute our Function and get early development feedback and rapidly arrive at our desired functionality. We'll further verify the correctness of our control plane's behavior with the new validate command, which will point out any ways that our generated resources may differ from their expected specification. With our cloud native control plane verified in the local development loop, we deploy to a live production environment. But what if an elusive issue appears there that we can't quite pinpoint? This is where the new trace command shines to give you a tree-like graph of related resources in which you can easily identify and resolve the culprit! Finally, we will quickly show how you can observe the Crossplane health and resource usage using the new top command, further ensuring your production environment remains healthy and reliable.