Why Upbound
Future of Cloud Computing: Control Planes
Upbound has democratized control planes so companies of all sizes can enable self service and flexibility to their customers without letting go of control, governance, reliability or security– all while reaping all the benefits of the cloud service providers.
Talk to Our ExpertsRise Above the Clouds with Upbound
Upbound invented the popular open-source project, Crossplane. With over 9,000 GitHub stars and over 10,000 Slack members, Crossplane is a framework for building cloud native control planes without needing to write code. It is the root of both products Upbound offers – Upbound and Universal Crossplane. With these offerings, Upbound strives to help every stakeholder of your business:
Happy Developers
Upbound provides streamlined development processes which remove TicketOps and simplify setting up GitOps workflows for infrastructure to provide a true self-service experience. As such, software engineers can fully focus on building rather than infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and management.
Productive Platform teams
Upbound simplifies the jobs of platform teams operating Crossplane at scale. First of its kind to exist in the Crossplane ecosystem, the Upbound Console allows users to view control plane usage, manage operations, debug API calls flowing through users’ control planes, and integrate with logging and monitoring solutions. Additionally, by offering developers self-service capabilities, platform engineers can maintain control of governance, security, access, and stability to maximize productivity.
Satisfied Customers
Upbound significantly reduces deployment time, up to 11,000 hours for existing customers, allowing engineering teams more time to work toward the customer needs. As such, they are able to offer stronger security, quicker maintenance, and more. Customers can get new products and features faster.
Modern Infrastructure Requires a Strong Separation of Concerns
Upbound provides a clear framework for the separation of concerns to simplify the relationship between operators and developers. It supplies a path that enables efficient infrastructure and application management. With this avenue for the operators (or platform team) to define infrastructure abstractions to app development teams, developers can consume on demand to freely work on their applications.
Operators
SREs and DevOps engineers compose cloud APIs using Crossplane’s Composition feature. Policies, permissions, and quotas for resources are encapsulated behind an API and continuously reconciled by the control plane. With the Upboud Console, operators see data in a single pane of glass. Control plane usage, operation management, API calls, and more – all presented in one place.
Developers
App teams can self-service infrastructure safely by consuming APIs built by platform teams and provided by Upbound & Crossplane. This workflow was designed with GitOps best practices in mind and is easily integrated into existing pipelines to allow developers to focus on building rather than infrastructure provisioning.
What is a Control Plane?
Managed Control Planes, Based in Automation
A single Crossplane instance hosted and managed by Upbound in Upbound. Upbound manages the underlying infrastructure, auto-scales users’ control planes to support platforms running thousands of CRDs! The control plane automatically manages major and minor upgrades of core components and provides automatic snapshotting of platform state for disaster recovery.
A Single Root Configuration
Installed on every managed control plane, the root configuration’s definition is always stored in git. The root Configuration itself can declare dependencies on other Configurations, but at the end of the day, it traces back to a root Configuration. The Configuration defines the API that will be emitted by the control plane.
Simplified Platforms Built with Flexibility
Get a single internal cloud platform by combining a configuration stored in git installed onto a managed control plane! For customized front-end solutions, choose from Backstage, an Internal Cloud Platform Portal served by Upbound or any other MCP Connector. Get started with a platform in mere minutes by selecting a configuration, connecting to GitHub, creating a managed control plane, and configuring the MCP.
Why Control Planes are the Best Kept Secret in Cloud Computing.
If organizations truly want self-service without relying on proprietary language and configuration and clouds, then control planes are the first and only way to standardize infrastructure with declarative-style and Universal APIs that orchestrate virtually anything that an enterprise may ever need in the future.
Declarative-Style Infrastructure and Universal API’s, not Templates
Kubernetes resources are managed around API’s and not templates. The API runs continuously in an automation loop to reconcile changes and prevent configuration drift. Upbound’s managed control planes unify application and infrastructure configuration to co-exist in the same control plane, reducing the complexity of your toolchains and deployment pipelines.
Customization, Extensibility, and Automation
Upbound is a cloud without any built in services – just interfaces, management services, and a Marketplace.You define your own services atop any vendor in the Upbound Marketplace, therefore making your platform tailor-made for your needs. Additionally, control planes built with Crossplane leverage broadly accepted Kubernetes patterns, making it easily extensible by adding your own APIs and controllers. Increase flexibility and security in your platform by baking policies, quotas, and permissions into a custom definition. Upbound’s managed control planes reduce your risk by automatically managing major & minor upgrades and snapshot platform state for disaster recovery.