Upbound, Creator of Open Source Crossplane Project, Celebrates Progress of the Crossplane Community at Crossplane Community Day

In Keynote Address, Bassam Tabbara, Upbound Founder & CEO, shares a vision for a cloud-native world beyond Infrastructure-as-Code

May 4, 2021 — SEATTLE — Upbound, creator of the open source Crossplane project, is Diamond sponsor of Crossplane Community Day Europe at KubeCon + Cloud Native Con EU. Upbound CEO Bassam Tabbara provided the keynote address: “Crossplane at the Crossroads.”

Tabbara described how Crossplane, an open source project donated by Upbound to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, unleashes the hidden superpower of Kubernetes—its control plane—and extends it to manage resources from different cloud and infrastructure vendors. Operators can encapsulate policies, permissions, and other guardrails behind a custom API line generated by Crossplane, and application developers can self-service from the API without needing to become infrastructure experts.

Tabbara also shared several initiatives within the community and CNCF that the community is working on, including a conformance program for distributions and providers, as well as progress toward the Crossplane project being promoted to incubation status.

“We started Crossplane because early on we saw the power of the operating model pioneered by the Kubernetes community and wanted to take it beyond container orchestration. We believe containers are simply the first use case for this model and that this model is applicable to all applications and infrastructure that organizations are managing.”

“We see Crossplane and Kubernetes ushering a new era of application and infrastructure management that will lead to a much higher degree of self-service and automation. These are a prerequisite to increasing the pace of innovation,” said Tabbara.

Crossplane Providers Available Today

Crossplane supports infrastructure from all the major cloud providers, and the community is constantly working on new providers. The current list of available providers includes:

  • Alibaba Cloud
  • AWS
  • Equinix
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • IBM Cloud
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Red Hat
  • Terraform
  • VMware

Crossplane Community Celebrates Progress

Since the Crossplane project’s initial release in 2018, the community has seen tremendous growth. Daniel Mangum—a maintainer of the Crossplane project, a senior software engineer at Upbound, and a member of the Crossplane Community Day program committee—said, “We have seen folks from all over the world discover the project and identify with the pain points it addresses. These individuals and organizations have come together to shape the direction of the technology, as well as build an open and welcoming community. Over the last year, Crossplane's maturity has been especially evident in its donation to the CNCF, the release of a stable v1.0 version, and its wide adoption in enterprise settings.”

Upbound and AWS are major sponsors of Crossplane Community Day, alongside Red Hat and VSHN.

Community Highlights:

End-User Adoption (A selection of users running Crossplane in staging or production):

  • Absa Group
  • Accenture
  • Amdocs
  • Akirix
  • Appvia
  • CloudCheckr
  • Dell Technologies
  • Deutsche Bahn
  • Electronic Arts
  • Guidewire
  • Humn
  • InfraCloud
  • Kiratech
  • Mastercard
  • Mercedes-Benz
  • Mothership
  • NTT
  • Nine Cloud Navigators
  • SAP
  • University of Virginia
  • Vodafone
  • VSHN AG

About Upbound.io

Upbound is the company behind the open source Crossplane project. Our mission is to enable a new era of infrastructure management that is automated, reliable, efficient and empowers application teams to self-service and deliver software faster, accelerating innovation. Upbound is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Follow Upbound on Twitter @Upbound_io, on GitHub or visit us at www.upbound.io.

Contact: press@upbound.io