<h2>What if onboarding a new software vendor was as easy as adding a dependency?</h2><p>The process of onboarding a new vendor in a large enterprise is long and arduous. While organizations frequently have a uniform set of checks that any software must undergo before it can be adopted, the process inevitably leads to special cases being identified as unique to each vendor. This creates an inefficient iteration cycle that can last months — time in which the vendor could have been providing value to the customer.</p><p>If vendors were able to package their product in a way that allowed them to easily integrate into existing customer platforms, adoption could be drastically more efficient.</p><h2>Crossplane Packages and API Dependencies</h2><p><a href="https://www.crossplane.io/" target="_blank">Crossplane</a> is a framework for building control planes. Large cloud providers offer a suite of services that provide varying levels of abstraction over physical compute. To build the platform that can offer these services to thousands of customers, cloud providers have an underlying control plane that ensures the desired state of infrastructure that a customer has requested is aligned with the actual state.</p><p>If they are not already, the control plane will work to drive the two states to alignment. In simplest terms, the control plane is what translates from the interface exposed to users to actions required to satisfy their requests. A platform is the API that the control plane exposes.</p>

<p>In Crossplane, the interface, or APIs, as well as the translation logic is grouped into&nbsp;<a href="https://docs.crossplane.io/v1.10/concepts/packages/"><u>packages</u></a>. Packages that include both APIs and logic are referred to as&nbsp;<a href="https://marketplace.upbound.io/providers"><u>Providers</u></a>, while those that strictly translate from an abstract interface to a more granular one are referred to as&nbsp;<a href="https://marketplace.upbound.io/configurations"><u>Configurations</u></a>.</p><p>Much like libraries in a programming language, packages may&nbsp;<a href="https://docs.crossplane.io/v1.10/concepts/packages/#configuration-packages"><u>declare dependencies</u></a>&nbsp;on other packages and build upon their APIs. When a package is installed in a Kubernetes cluster where Crossplane is running, the package manager will evaluate its dependencies and install compatible versions of any that are not already present.</p>

<p>For example, if a user wanted to build a Configuration package that presented a developer-friendly interface to requesting MySQL databases, they may define a translation from that interface to the <a href="https://marketplace.upbound.io/providers/upbound/provider-aws/latest/resources/rds.aws.upbound.io/Instance/v1beta1" target="_blank">RDS API</a> offered by <a href="https://marketplace.upbound.io/providers/upbound/provider-aws/latest" target="_blank">provider-aws</a>, then declare a dependency on provider-aws, with optional version constraints. When their Configuration package is installed, Crossplane will ensure that provider-aws is also present.</p><p>If another user then wanted to include the MySQL API alongside other APIs in their control plane, they could either install the MySQL Configuration package directly or declare a dependency on it from another package that is installed. Either way, Crossplane will traverse the dependency tree, ensuring that a control plane with healthy packages will respond to the creation of the instance of any API with the desired behavior.</p><h2><strong>Defining a Platform with a Root Package</strong></h2><p>While Crossplane allows users to install many packages alongside one another, a common pattern has emerged of defining a single “root” package, which is an ancestor node of every other package that gets installed in a control plane. Doing so makes the entire API surface area reproducible by installing that one package. As an organization grows and evolves over time, that package can be expanded by defining new APIs or establishing new dependencies.</p>

<p>Furthermore, because using a root package is a convention rather than a technical constraint, the property of composability is not violated. Taking the previously mentioned MySQL Configuration package for example, a user may install it as the root package of their MySQL database control plane, while another user may depend on it as only one component of a much larger API surface for use cases like internal cloud platforms.</p><h2>Declaring a Vendor Dependency</h2><p>While the attributes of Crossplane packages enable platform builders to quickly add functionality to their control planes, they also present a unique distribution mechanism for vendors. When your customers all build on a common substrate, you need only target that substrate. Furthermore, the APIs you offer to your customers do not have to be “one size fits all” — there is room for customization both in front and behind the interface.</p>

<p>As an example, a developer tools vendor may offer a product to enterprise customers that manages hosted development environments. The service needs to be distributed in a manner that it can be run on the customer’s cloud provider of choice, and the interface to deploy a development environment needs to support all configuration options that a customer could need. Typically, this would require a combination of scripts, deployment manifests and documentation.</p><p>However, when bundling as a Crossplane package, a vendor can specify dependencies on external infrastructure, such as a relational database or in-memory cache and rely on the customer’s control plane to provide them.</p>

<p>To make it concrete, a Configuration package to deploy the aforementioned hosted development environment product on AWS could establish a dependency on provider-aws, and include a Composition that created an RDS instance. When the customer adds the Configuration package as a dependency in their root package, Crossplane will verify the presence of a compatible version of provider-aws in their control plane.</p><p>When the customer interacts with the API offered by the vendor package, the creation of an RDS instance object in the cluster will result in the provisioning of an RDS instance in the customer’s AWS account, subject to all of the policies and constraints they already have in place. Because the vendor’s deployment ultimately depends upon the APIs that the customer’s control plane already offers, a successful deployment implies compliance.</p><p>Similarly, the customer is not required to interface with the vendor’s product via the interface that the vendor offers. A common pattern in the Crossplane community is to take an API and wrap it in a higher-level abstraction, optionally including additional resources that are to be provisioned alongside the original.</p><p>For example, if a customer wanted to create monitoring and alerting policies that are custom to their organization every time they deployed a developer environment, they could wrap the vendor’s developer environment API and their monitoring APIs in a higher-level abstraction, and only give developers access to interact with the abstract API.</p><h2>Discovering Your Next Platform Component</h2><p>To build platforms like the ones described in this post, customers need a place to discover packages and vendors need a means of distribution. The Crossplane community takes advantage of the automatic API documentation and robust discoverability features of the <a href="https://marketplace.upbound.io/" target="_blank">Upbound Marketplace</a>. Search for your next platform component or publish your own, and feel free to reach out in <a href="https://slack.crossplane.io/" target="_blank">Crossplane Slack</a> if you have any questions!</p><p>This article was originally posted on <a href="https://thenewstack.io/crossplane-a-package-based-approach-to-platform-building/" target="_blank">The New Stack here.</a></p>

Crossplane: A Package-Based Approach to Platform Building

<h2><strong>Millennium bcp</strong></h2><p><a href="https://www.upbound.io/why-upbound/customers/millennium-bcp" target="_blank">Millennium bcp</a> is Portugal’s largest private-sector bank, with 1,334 branches serving more than 6 million customers around the world. The key to its vision and success has been continued investment in the latest technologies to generate business value. The bank was among the first in its market to introduce ATMs and alternative payment methods, and one of the first to deploy early online services like transactional websites and an online financial marketplace.</p><h2><strong>Crossplane</strong></h2><p><a href="http://www.crossplane.io/" target="_blank">Crossplane</a> is a popular open-source project with the CNCF that leverages the Kubernetes API and control plane model to help organizations build internal cloud platforms managed with control planes. Because Crossplane shares a foundation with Kubernetes it integrates smoothly with most popular cloud native tools.</p><h2><strong>The Problem</strong></h2><p>Millennium bcp spent over five years building their automation practices into their platform, including Terraform modules, HCL code, and more. While they adhered to cutting-edge industry standards, challenges such as state drift and continuous compliance still persisted. Also, although infrastructure teams were able to efficiently execute the initial delivery of resources to other teams, internal customers were not seeing the same efficiency gains as infrastructure teams, as their requests were still being queued.</p><h2><strong>The Solution (or Why Crossplane?)</strong></h2><p>Millennium bcp wanted to mitigate their problems while incorporating the existing infrastructure they had. Rather than rip and replace, they wanted a technology that could work with the Terraform modules and other legacy code they already had implemented. They intended it to be a phased approach to solving their issues while maintaining the experience for their developers.</p><p>Crossplane presented itself as a clear option for the prime solution. It helped eliminate state drift, apply continuous and automatic compliance, and improve their inefficiencies –&nbsp;all while leveraging the existing modules. The adoption of Universal Crossplane by Upbound as a control plane was implemented in a multi-stage approach without impact to the apps or developer experience.</p><p><strong>Millennium bcp went from an SLA of</strong> <a href="https://resources.upbound.io/all-content/portugals-largest-private-sector-bank-works-with-upbound-to-save-thousands-of-hours-a-year" target="_blank"><strong>8 days for project and dependencies setup to only a few minutes</strong></a><strong> for full deployment of an app and dependencies to a new environment, saving thousands of man-hours in production per year.</strong></p><h2><strong>Why Upbound</strong></h2><p><a href="https://www.upbound.io/?ref=upbound-blog" target="_blank">Upbound</a> is the creator of Crossplane and the industry’s first platform for building internal cloud platforms. Designed around control planes, Upbound offers a new way for building internal cloud platforms, purpose-built for your organization. Customers can build, deploy, manage, secure, and use their platforms all from a single point of control.</p><h2><strong>Upbound Product Value</strong></h2><ul><li><strong>Building Blocks with Operations.</strong> Crossplane is the perfect solution to build an internal cloud platform that increases efficiency and reduces configuration drift. Crossplane contains the logic, machinery, and reusable components that can be assembled to achieve your organization’s unique vision of efficiently and reliably delivering infrastructure and applications to production. You can think of this framework as the “building blocks” for creating specialized and customized platforms. Millennium bcp used Upbound’s official Terraform Provider and featured configurations like custom blueprints and reference platforms to power their internal cloud platform.</li><li><strong>Self-Managed Control Planes.</strong> Crossplane is a framework for building Control Planes which enable organizations to consolidate teams onto a single platform. A control plane-based architecture gives you a declarative approach to defining and managing resources, continuous reconciliation of resources to eliminate configuration drift, and a pattern for achieving self-service. Millennium bcp leveraged the official Terraform provider to help streamline their platform to mitigate configuration drift, reduce human error in provisioning resources, improved compliance throughout the resource’s lifecycle, and more. It gave them flexibility to work with the infrastructure they had already built, helping to save time and effort in the migration.</li><li><strong>Integration &amp; Migration Support.</strong> Millennium bcp loves that they can leverage existing Terraform modules while simultaneously helping them migrate toward a fully-powered Crossplane solution. On top of that, they rely on Upbound’s 24/7 support and assistance to implement enterprise-grade reference architectures and integrations for Crossplane. Universal Crossplane (UXP), the commercially supported distribution of Crossplane, runs anywhere — both on-premise and on any cloud solution. It can be installed into any cluster to expose Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and a standard API across your entire infrastructure and service providers.</li></ul><h2><strong>Upbound Customer Support and Customer Success</strong></h2><p>Upbound’s Customer Success team exists to deliver value to customers by engaging with them from the moment they sign on. Our regular alignment calls, private Slack channels, private GitHub repositories, and quarterly business reviews ensure we’re always in close communication, and that Upbound always has the correct context to help in the right ways, quickly. We provide architecture reviews, resource support, best practices, bespoke training, and setup and installation guidance. Why? We want to enable customers to swap their business pains with business value; to do everything they want to do with Upbound.</p><p>Millennium bcp knew that with Upbound, they would see results quickly, and they would see results that grow and last over time.</p><h2><strong>Summary</strong></h2><p>Terraform has served as the industry standard to automate various processes to optimize platform infrastructure. However, with Crossplane providing Control Plane architecture, it’s time to shift the standard. Millennium bcp took a phased approach in migrating their infrastructure to Crossplane, all while leveraging the current Terraform modules they currently have. Their migration shortened their SLA time from 8 days to 8 minutes, saving thousands of hours and heavily reducing costs.</p><h2><strong>Want to know more?</strong></h2><p>Nuno, Cloud Compute Lead at Millennium bcp, <a href="https://resources.upbound.io/all-content/kubernetes-called-and-it-wants-your-iac-back-using-control-planes-to-modernize-your-iac-tech-stack" target="_blank">hopped onto a webinar with a few Upbounders</a> to explain the exact steps his organization took when implementing Upbound Universal Crossplane. In addition, he has put together everything you need to know in a <a href="https://resources.upbound.io/all-content/portugals-largest-private-sector-bank-works-with-upbound-to-save-thousands-of-hours-a-year" target="_blank">useful case study</a>. To see the solution above in further detail, be sure to visit <a href="https://www.upbound.io/why-upbound/customers/millennium-bcp" target="_blank">Millennium bcp’s detailed page on Upbound’s website here</a>.</p>

Cloud Efficiency in Banking: Portugal’s Largest Private-Sector Bank Saves Thousands of Hours a Year with Crossplane & Upbound

<h2>Grupo Boticário</h2><p><a href="https://www.grupoboticario.com.br/en/grupo-boticario/" target="_blank">Grupo Boticário</a> is a global, sustainable cosmetics company headquartered in Brazil. With over 4,000 stores worldwide, they are the second largest in Brazil, and fifteenth largest in the world.</p><h2>Crossplane</h2><p><a href="https://crossplane.io/" target="_blank">Crossplane</a> is an open source CNCF project that leverages the Kubernetes API to transform your cluster into a universal control plane. Crossplane enables platform teams to use Providers to install <a href="https://blog.upbound.io/__GHOST_URL__/scaling-kubernetes-to-thousands-of-crds/">Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs)</a>, extending the Kubernetes API with new kinds to provision, compose, and consume infrastructure from multiple vendors, without having to write any code.</p><h2>The Problem</h2><p>Like many large companies, Grupo Boticário built up a sprawling infrastructure stack over time, with different teams using different tools to solve the same problems over and over. Grupo Boticário’s small infrastructure team was servicing a large development team and one hundred product teams. This caused a huge backlog, which meant blocked and frustrated developers, waiting sometimes days or weeks to provision a simple database, challenges scaling infrastructure, and slow time to market. It became clear that, in order to continue to grow to meet future demand, Grupo Boticário would need to find new solutions. When they discovered Crossplane + Upbound, it was a thing of beauty!</p><h2>The Solution (or Why Crossplane?)</h2><p>Grupo Boticário wanted to efficiently scale their DevOps teams and infrastructure. They didn’t want their teams to have to spend time requesting AWS accounts and credentials to run their ArgoCD pipelines and spin up infrastructure. Grupo Boticário wanted a centralized, standardized, self-service platform for their developers to provision approved infrastructure. They wanted to enable developers to get what they needed easily, and to create applications and services with as little friction as possible.</p><p>Crossplane emerged as the clear winner in terms of innovation and ease of use. Crossplane gave Grupo Boticário the ability to have a set, repeatable, consistent pattern; now they can easily provision resources within their ArgoCD pipelines using GitHub Actions.</p><h2>Why Upbound</h2><p><a href="https://www.upbound.io/" target="_blank">Upbound</a> is the creator of Crossplane and the industry’s first platform for building internal cloud platforms. Designed around control planes, Upbound offers a new way for building internal cloud platforms, purpose-built for your organization. Customers can build, deploy, manage, secure, and use their platforms all from a single point of control.</p><h3>Upbound Product Value</h3><ul><li>Official Providers. With Upbound’s Official Providers, you get stable, full coverage parity with cloud vendor APIs. All resource APIs are production ready, giving platform teams a stable foundation to build their Internal Cloud Platforms. No longer would Grupo Boticário have to worry about using alpha resources in production, or a missing AWS resource causing additional development work.</li><li><a href="https://marketplace.upbound.io/" target="_blank">Marketplace</a>. Upbound’s Marketplace has the perfect solutions to build internal cloud platforms. This is where Grupo Boticário found Official Providers and featured configurations—custom blueprints and reference platforms to power their internal cloud platform.</li><li>Flexibility. Grupo Boticário loves that Upbound runs anywhere, on-premises and on any cloud. It installs into any cluster and exposes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and a standard API across infrastructure and service providers, and integrates with a single Kubernetes cluster in EKS, AKS, GKE, ACK, PKS and multi-cluster managers such as Rancher and Anthos.</li></ul><h3>Upbound Customer Support and Customer Success</h3><p>Upbound’s Customer Success team exists to deliver value to customers by engaging with them from the moment they sign on. Our regular alignment calls, private Slack channels, private GitHub repositories, and quarterly business reviews ensure we’re always in close communication, and that Upbound always has the correct context to help in the right ways, quickly. We provide architecture reviews, resource support, best practices, bespoke trainings, and setup and installation guidance. Why? We want to enable customers to swap their business pains with business value; to do everything they want to do with Upbound.</p><p>Grupo Boticário knew that with Upbound, they would see results quickly, and they would see results that grow and last over time.</p><h2>Summary</h2><p>Grupo Boticário built an efficient, scalable and future-proofed platform using Crossplane and Upbound combined with Github Actions, ArgoCD and Backstage. With this solution, Grupo Boticário are now doing a lot more, and doing it with less. They have fewer tools and fewer DevOps tickets; this has reduced costs and sped up time to market. Developers are happier, and the Platform team have reduced their security risks and increased efficiencies through better automation.</p><h2>Want to know more?</h2><p>To learn more and ask questions about Grupo Boticário’s Crossplane solution join our upcoming webinar with Grupo Boticário’s Head of Infrastructure, Márcio Ribeiro on November 10 at 8 AM PT. Márcio will give you an exclusive look at their current implementation and discusses why they chose Crossplane + Upbound over other possible solutions. Márcio will share real-time ROI metrics as the result of reducing deployment time from days to minutes. With Crossplane + Upbound, Grupo Boticário Boticario will never have to replatform again.</p><p><a href="https://resources.upbound.io/webinars/from-days-to-minutes-how-grupo-boticario-reduced-deployment-time-using-crossplane-upbound" target="_blank">View the on-demand webinar that talks all about this!</a></p>

Beauty That is More Than Skin Deep: How Grupo Boticário Future-Proofed with Crossplane & Upbound

<p>This blog is for anyone stretching beyond the limits of their infrastructure or platform engineering teams and looking for a way to streamline their processes to overcome common cloud native issues.</p><p>This piece outlines the digital transformation <a href="https://www.upbound.io/why-upbound/customers/grupo-boticario" target="_blank">Grupo Boticário</a>, one of the largest cosmetic companies in Brazil, has gone through in the last few years. It explains the core problems the company went through when reaching limits on their infrastructure team, as well as the solutions they invested in.</p><h2>Who is Grupo Boticário?</h2><p><a href="https://www.upbound.io/why-upbound/customers/grupo-boticario" target="_blank">Grupo Boticário</a> is a global, sustainable cosmetics company headquartered in Brazil. With over 4,000 stores worldwide, they are the second largest cosmetics company in Brazil and the fifteenth largest in the world.</p><p>Below is a testimonial from one of Crossplane and Upbound’s core users from Grupo Boticário, Francisco Ribas, <a href="https://medium.com/gbtech/increasing-developer-velocity-and-satisfaction-through-automation-921e9da01ad3" target="_blank">written on Grupo Boticário’s tech department’s blog here</a>. It explains the process he and his team went through when looking at technologies such as Helm, ArgoCD, and more, in addition to Crossplane and Upbound. Read on to understand why one of the leading cosmetics companies in the world invested in Crossplane and Upbound to increase developer velocity, decrease deployment time, and more!</p><p>&nbsp;</p><hr><p>&nbsp;</p><h2>Abstract</h2><p>By 2019, Grupo Boticário started its technological transformation, and internalized the development of many solutions. Due to this business change, the technology team grew substantially, from less than 500 in November 2019, to 1,600 people in December 2022.</p><p>As we know, during this period, the COVID pandemic changed the technology market, and good professionals, mainly with cloud and infrastructure skills, became hard to hire and development tasks were commonly blocked by pending provision of infrastructure and cloud services. Going forward, the increase of the maturity of architecture and security of our solutions included extra patterns to be achieved manually, bringing even more complexity and time spent on provisioning.</p><p>The solution was to automate the process of provisioning common services, using some well-known and some disrupting tools. The success of this solution is so successful that the time spent on the process dropped from 5 days to a maximum of 20 minutes.</p><h2>Background: Multiteam and manual way</h2><p>With more than 1,000 developers working on our solutions, it was a strategic decision to have a specific team to take care of cloud and infra topics, considering cost optimization and the difficult-to-hire infrastructure workforce.</p><p>The process used by that infra team is almost a market pattern and broadly adopted by large tech companies. It already adopts good practices and modern tooling, such as <i>Infrastructure as Code</i>, <i>Terraform</i> and <i>HCL</i>, <i>GitHub Repositories</i>, <i>Pull Requests</i> and <i>Atlantis</i></p><p>Using the Gitops concept, the source of truth was GitHub Repositories with HCL defining the infrastructure. The repository contained the infra of a specific product and was maintained mainly by the infrastructure team, making changes and creating new resources on demand, fulfilling requests opened by the development team.</p><p>We can resume all processes using an activities diagram:</p>

<p>Despite this being a very good and elegant solution, it was common to have a conflicting prioritization between Development and Devops backlogs, and unexceptional delays occurred caused by blocked teams waiting for each other. This all, adding the fact of our restricted workforce on Devops team, made the problem escalate to a very painful grade, so, a solution was urgent for this situation.</p><h2>Looking for a better process</h2><p>More than just automating the infrastructure creation, the upcoming changes gave us the opportunity to enforce some other patterns that were not always implemented by the manual creation process, like security enforcements and roles and policies restructuring. And, of course, this solution must increase the user experience for all teams involved in the creation.</p><p>First off, we separate our infrastructure into two categories. Each category has its own stack, target team and a defined desired experience for each one.</p><p>The first category is <i>structuring infrastructure</i> that comprehends the base infrastructure to run our solution. It contains the definition of clusters, security groups, global roles and policies, for example. This category is maintained by the devops team and, to not change its experience, the stack remained unchanged, using the flow detailed above, with <i>Terraform</i>, <i>HCL</i> and <i>Atlantis</i>.</p><p>The second category is <i>product infrastructure</i> that contains all resources related directly to a product of a development team. For this category, we change the stack substantially. The most significant change was the adoption of <i>Crossplane</i> over <i>Terraform</i> and <i>ArgoCD</i> over <i>Atlantis</i>.</p><p>This stack change enabled us to have the same experience for both application and infrastructure deployment: both are defined into application repository, deployed by GitHub Actions and ArgoCD, and provide a unified status too.</p><p>Going forward, we abstract all complex parameters of cloud services, using helm charts. So the code of infrastructure into the repository is simple and readable, and all patterns of security and infrastructure are enforced by devops teams into the helm chart. We also automated the generation of infrastructure code, application base code and pipeline, using a template machine built by our platform team, called <a href="https://github.com/scafflater/scafflater" target="_blank">Scafflater</a>. It all uses <i>Backstage</i> as an interface and the final experience for developers is a form with few fields to be filled, resulting in a repository ready to be deployed minutes after requested.</p>

<p>With this new process, we transform the way to work, mainly of devops teams. Now its work impacts all developers by template implementations instead of manual provision, focusing on how maintaining templates ensures that all company patterns are implemented:</p>

<h2>Conclusion</h2><p>All global scenarios that we passed the last 3 years showed that tech is not more a coadjuvant on every business. The old IT was transformed. The way businesses work demands more agile and solution-builder teams that need to focus on constructing solutions for their clients, with the velocity that they need. It does not matter the size of your company, if it does not care about automating manual processes, its destiny is to have a time-consuming process and a misused and unhappy workforce.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><hr><p>&nbsp;</p><p><i>Crossplane and Upbound provide the agility that the industry requires now more than ever. The open source incubating CNCF project, Crossplane, simplifies the workflow of platform engineering teams of any size by offering features such as continuous reconciliation.</i></p><p><i>Upbound offers enterprise-grade Crossplane architecture for your cloud native platform. It unlocks the ability to scale Crossplane with enterprise features like compliance and security, as well as easy implementation and adoption. To see how Crossplane and Upbound can save upwards of 20,000 SRE hours like it did for Grupo Boticário, enroll in our trial today (at no cost). It will exemplify a small snippet of the features available, such as a console for day-2 operations, a seamless git integration, and more.</i></p>

Global Cosmetics Leader Increases Developer Velocity and Satisfaction Through Automation

<p>Navigating the complexities of enterprise cloud infrastructure is a huge challenge, specifically for organizations with diverse services and teams. <a href="https://www.crossplane.io/" target="_blank">Crossplane</a>, in conjunction with the <a href="https://www.upbound.io/product/upbound" target="_blank">Upbound platform</a>, offers a transformative solution to streamline these operations. In our recent webinar, "<a href="https://resources.upbound.io/all-content/crossplane-in-the-trenches-orchestrating-complexity-in-enterprise-cloud-landscapes" target="_blank">Crossplane in the Trenches: Orchestrating Complexity in Enterprise Cloud Landscapes</a>”, we delved into a compelling case study demonstrating how a large insurance provider successfully harnessed Crossplane to manage their intricate cloud environment.</p>

<p>This blog aims to address advanced Crossplane users looking to run in production, or presently running in production, by focusing on the real-world application and success of Crossplane in this enterprise scenario.</p><h2>Introduction: Solving Enterprise Cloud Challenges with Crossplane</h2><p>I’ve had the privilege of working with multiple companies across various industries, witnessing the evolution of infrastructure management firsthand. From shell scripting to infrastructure as code, and now to control plane-based architectures with Crossplane, it’s been quite a journey. A couple of years ago, I joined Upbound to lead the control plane adoption across the industry, and I’ve been passionate about it ever since.</p><p>In one of our recent projects, I had the opportunity to work closely with Jan from Cloudprizm. Together, we helped one of the world’s largest insurance companies transition to Crossplane. This case study showcases how we tackled the complexities of their cloud infrastructure and successfully leveraged Crossplane to enhance efficiency, observability, and self-service capabilities.</p><h2>Case Study: Crossplane at Scale in an Insurance Giant</h2><p>Our case study revolves around an insurance provider grappling with complex infrastructure management. The goal was to migrate to Crossplane to enhance efficiency, observability, and self-service capabilities. Here’s a detailed look at the steps and strategies employed.</p><h3>Initial Setup and Migration</h3><p>Initially, teams at the insurance company managed their infrastructure using a mix of infrastructure as code pipelines, which proved cumbersome and lacked the flexibility needed for modern cloud operations.</p><p>The transition began with creating custom Crossplane providers that expose <a href="https://blog.upbound.io/scaling-kubernetes-to-thousands-of-crds">Kubernetes CRDs</a> to wrap existing cloud and enterprise APIs, providing a more standardized and manageable interface. This step allowed for a smoother migration path and set the foundation for further integration.</p><h3>Leveraging Crossplane’s Full Potential</h3><p>Over time, the teams adopted <a href="https://marketplace.upbound.io/providers?tier=official" target="_blank">official Upbound providers</a>, fully leveraging Crossplane’s capabilities to manage resources seamlessly. This included provisioning Azure subscriptions, virtual networks, peering, and setting up necessary IAM roles.</p><h3>Advanced Tooling and Strategies</h3><p>Crossplane, along with the Upbound, enabled the creation of a custom platform API. This API abstracted the complexity of underlying resources, allowing developers to focus on application logic. Azure multi-account management was abstracted away by automatically creating ProviderConfigs using Crossplane <a href="https://docs.crossplane.io/latest/concepts/compositions/" target="_blank">Compositions</a>. It enabled flexible subscription access without direct credentials exposure to the platform consumers.&nbsp;</p><p>Another requirement was to use strong enterprise conventions for the resource naming that is constructed from different data sources depending on the multiple composed resource state. Using <a href="https://docs.crossplane.io/latest/concepts/patch-and-transform/#patching-between-resources" target="_blank">bidirectional patching</a> to share data between multiple composed resources helped to provide a reliable solution and demonstrate the feasibility of API data flow even in case of a constrained and declarative <a href="https://docs.crossplane.io/latest/concepts/patch-and-transform/" target="_blank">Patch and Transform</a> engine.&nbsp;</p>

<p>The reconciliation loop inherent in Kubernetes ensured continuous alignment between the desired and actual state of resources, mitigating configuration drift and enhancing reliability.</p><h3>Dynamic Resource Management</h3><p>One of the project’s challenges was managing dynamic resource creation, such as subnets based on user-provided CIDRs. This was addressed using Crossplane <a href="https://docs.crossplane.io/latest/concepts/composition-functions/" target="_blank">Composition Functions</a>, which allowed the use of loops and conditionals. With functions like <a href="https://github.com/crossplane-contrib/function-go-templating/" target="_blank">function-go-templating</a> and <a href="https://github.com/crossplane-contrib/function-kcl/" target="_blank">function-kcl</a> we can express the advanced composition logic.&nbsp;</p><p>Controlled injection of <a href="https://github.com/upbound/provider-terraform/" target="_blank">provider-terraform</a> covered the gap in resource API coverage. For example, we utilized data source capability to dynamically import external resources similar to the <a href="https://github.com/upbound/provider-terraform/tree/main/examples/importer" target="_blank">importer example</a>. This approach provided a robust and flexible infrastructure management solution.</p><p>The team used a multi-tiered strategy to dynamically create resources, combining standard patch and transform mechanisms with advanced templating techniques.</p><h3>Testing and Continuous Integration</h3><p>The team explored Upbound’s testing framework, <a href="https://github.com/crossplane/uptest" target="_blank"><code>uptest</code></a>, to ensure the reliability of their infrastructure code. This framework automated end-to-end testing of Crossplane Configurations, providing high confidence in the deployed solutions. The uptest framework demo is covered in detail at <a href="https://resources.upbound.io/level-up/crossplane-testing-patterns-level-up-with-crossplane-presented-by-upbound-may-2024" target="_blank">Crossplane Testing Patterns</a> talk from Level Up event.</p><h2>Conclusion: Crossplane and Upbound – Your Enterprise Cloud Solution</h2><p>This case study underscores the transformative power of Crossplane and Upbound in <a href="https://www.upbound.io/customers/grupo-boticario" target="_blank">managing complex enterprise cloud infrastructures</a>. By abstracting the intricacies of resource management and providing powerful tooling for customization and observability, Crossplane enables teams to deliver value more effectively.</p><p><a href="https://www.upbound.io/product/upbound" target="_blank">Upbound</a> builds upon this to layer in <a href="https://resources.upbound.io/all-content/added-benefits-of-using-upbound-over-oss-crossplane" target="_blank">features not otherwise available in OSS Crossplane alone</a>, including enterprise security via SSO and RBAC, disaster recovery, reduced day 2 operations burden, scalability, and more. Starting with Upbound provides an easier and more reliable experience overall.</p><p>For advanced Crossplane users, the success of this insurance provider showcases the potential of adopting Crossplane and Upbound for your enterprise needs. The combination of robust infrastructure management, dynamic resource creation, and seamless integration makes this solution unparalleled in its ability to handle enterprise-scale challenges.</p><h2>Experience the Power of Crossplane and Upbound</h2><p>If you want to see the demo in action with Jan and I, <a href="https://resources.upbound.io/all-content/crossplane-in-the-trenches-orchestrating-complexity-in-enterprise-cloud-landscapes">view the webinar where we shared all of the details here</a>. The multi-cloud landing zone abstraction example that is featured in the demo can be found at <a href="https://github.com/cloudprizm/landing-zone" target="_blank">this repository here</a>.</p><p>Upbound has a treasure trove of added benefits over the open source project to qualify it to power infrastructure at large corporations. To see how, start your <a href="https://www.upbound.io/register/a">30 day trial with Upbound today</a>.&nbsp;</p>

Crossplane in Production: Scaling Cloud Infrastructure for an Insurance Giant

<p><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);">Grupo Boticário is the second largest cosmetic company in Brazil. They built an efficient, scalable and future-proofed platform using Crossplane and Upbound. With this solution, they now deploy applications in minutes rather than over 7 days, saving over 20,000 work hours.</span></p>

How Grupo Boticário Reduced Deployment from Hours to Minutes Using Crossplane and Upbound

<p><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);">See how Upbound's workflow allowed Millennium bcp to move from an SLA of eight days for project and dependencies setup to just-in-time provisioning, taking only a few minutes for full deployment of an app and dependencies to a new environment.&nbsp;</span></p>

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<p>Discover how Crossplane, alongside existing infrastructure tools like Terraform, empowered this enterprise to navigate an intricate cloud landscape with success—and how you can do it, too!</p><p>In this webinar, you will:</p><ul><li>Gain practical insights into leveraging Crossplane for modern cloud infrastructures atop Kubernetes clusters.</li><li>See Crossplane's power in action, creating subscription and networking infrastructure on Azure using the Upbound platform.</li><li>Discover strategies to construct customized infrastructure APIs and facilitate effective team collaboration.</li><li>Explore a compelling case study demonstrating Crossplane's real-world application in addressing enterprise-scale challenges.</li></ul>

Crossplane in the Trenches: Orchestrating Complexity in Enterprise Cloud Landscapes

<p><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);">In this webinar, Grupo Boticário’s Head of Infrastructure, Márcio Ribeiro, gives you an exclusive look at their current implementation and discusses why they chose Crossplane + Upbound over other possible solutions. Márcio will share real-time ROI metrics as a result of reducing deployment time from days to minutes. With Crossplane + Upbound, Grupo Boticario will never have to re-platform again.</span></p>