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Introducing the new Upbound Partner Program: Leading the partner ecosystem for Crossplane

Published Date
Author Rob Clark

We are excited to announce that Upbound has launched the Global Upbound Partner Program, supporting the rapidly growing ecosystem around Crossplane. The new program enables partners to access Upbound’s products and services along with resources, technical expertise and go-to-market opportunities.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how Upbound and our partners are helping customers and how you can join the partner program.

Enabling enterprises to standardize on a self-service platform

Enterprises are struggling with the complexity of delivering secure, scalable infrastructure to their business. It is typical for companies to have fragmented platforms across organizations, usually built with a plethora of tools and services, or “devops glue.”

The custom glue approach reaches a point where it simply doesn’t scale. There’s no single source of truth, and expensive resources spend time duplicating effort for workflows, abstractions, security, and compliance. Those resources also have to deal with multiple interfaces for each workflow: APIs, UIs, Jira, ServiceNow…the list goes on.

The mix of tools and custom processes is a costly burden on the organization for five reasons:

  • Time wasted for developers: It puts a high cognitive load on developers, who have to spend time investing in platform considerations.
  • Skills gaps: Skills aren’t readily transferable across teams, inhibiting resource utilization.
  • Manual process: It creates repeated and tedious manual processes to adhere to company policies, such as security and governance.
  • Lacking unified standards: Production issues are time-consuming for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to resolve because nothing is standard.
  • Lacking pluggability: Adopting new services and vendors is a challenge.

The only real way to solve this problem is to have a standard platform. One that is a central place that makes implementing policy and security practices simple and repeatable. One that reduces the amount of time and money spent on delivering and maintaining infrastructure. One that eliminates the manual steps that are barriers to developers developing.

If you’d like to learn more about the rationale behind this approach, check out this video from Crossplane developer advocate Viktor Farcic, discussing why Internal Developer Platforms make sense, and how to create them.

The Upbound Platform: A new approach to managing infrastructure

The Upbound products and services deliver just that - the ability to create a standard platform for development and production, with a simple API, that enables developers to configure infrastructure rather than code it. Platform engineers create reusable APIs to deliver a self-service experience to developers, and they manage the vendors and services needed.

Upbound goes one step further with its scalable control plane technology. The product eliminates configuration drift that is common today when using infrastructure as code (IaC) CLI tooling and enables companies to use this approach at a massive scale.

You could think of Upbound as a product to create custom abstractions across any and all infrastructure, that reduces cognitive load for developers and enables them to focus on feature development, and delivers a single source of truth for the business to make and implement decisions.

Upbound customer Grupo Boticário decided to take this approach rather than increase spending with existing vendors, and the results were impressive. Grupo now executes development pipelines in under two minutes and has freed up thousands of hours of team capacity to spend on building and innovating. You can read the case study here.

How to partner with Upbound

Upbound works with a global network of Technology Vendors, System Integrators, Resellers and Cloud Service Providers to help enterprises take advantage of this new approach to infrastructure management, from small businesses to government to the Fortune 500.

Technology Partners

The Upbound Technology Partner Program enables independent vendors to build, test and publish solution-level integrations of their products and services with the Upbound platform. Upbound then supports those companies with go-to-market resources, training, co-sell opportunities and support.

Technology partners play an essential role in the Crossplane ecosystem. In joining the program, partners are empowered to build Crossplane providers for the Upbound Marketplace, free and available for any user to find and install in their own Crossplane control planes. New Upbound Partner Providers expand the ecosystem of supported providers, authored and maintained by the partner and verified by Upbound as compatible with its products and services.

Inaugural partner Aviatrix, an expert in multi-cloud network security, developed an integration with the Upbound platform and has published their new Partner Provider in the Upbound Marketplace. Users can confidently take a dependency on Aviatrix and Upbound, knowing that the solution is mature and supported.

The two companies recently delivered a joint solution to deliver fast, self-service VPN provisioning for a Fortune 100 company. The client was spending valuable time on repetitive, manual processes to simply get developers set up to start working on projects. They took advantage of Upbound’s infrastructure composition technology to combine Aviatrix and Upbound to automate the process in a secure, repeatable way.

“We’re delighted to deliver the Aviatrix Crossplane Provider, the first Partner Provider in the Upbound Marketplace. With this development, the power of Aviatrix Secure Cloud Networking is available directly from within Kubernetes, and can be easily configured using standard GitOps tooling for fast and flexible application delivery,” said Mitch Connors, Open Source lead, Aviatrix,” said Mitch Connors, Open Source Lead, Aviatrix.

Upbound also recently collaborated with VMware to integrate Upbound’s Universal Crossplane (UXP) with their Tanzu Application Platform product. You can read about it here. VMware’s clients were looking for an automated way to provision and connect services in a Tanzu environment, and integrating with UXP delivers the solution.

If you are interested in creating and integrating with Upbound’s Crossplane-powered platform please contact us here.

System Integrator Partners

Upbound’s System Integrator partners are trusted and experienced consultants and advisors that provide customized solutions to clients. Integrators like Accenture and Navteca are generating new revenue by addressing the growing need to help customers modernize their developer platforms.

“Upbound has consistently delivered deep Crossplane control plane expertise, solutions and support to Accenture’s clients. We’re excited to scale our partnership as control-plane-based architectures become more broadly adopted,” Jan Willies, Platform Architect, Accenture.

We proudly welcome minority-owned Navteca to the program, a services company focused on emerging technologies for the science engineering and technology segments. Navteca is a leading innovator in solutions for scientists. For example, Navteca uses Upbound compositions to enable self-service access to high-performance computing services, resulting in faster and broader analysis of massive data sets - without waiting months for IT services to set up infrastructure.

“We’re excited to partner with Upbound to develop leading-edge solutions for the NASA Science Cloud, using Crossplane Compositions to deploy the Open Science Studio for fast, self-service access to cloud-based Jupyterhub and HPC services,” said Ramon Ramirez-Linan, Co-founder, Navteca.

Reseller Program

Upbound works with a global network of resellers to give customers a path to purchase products, services and support where it makes the most sense. Upbound’s resellers cover all segments including Financial Services, Banking, Science, Healthcare and Government. Partners can register for co-sell opportunities here.

If you are looking for an Upbound partner or are interested in signing up for the program, please visit the Upbound partner page.

Cloud Partners

Upbound partners with the three major cloud service providers to deliver well-integrated and optimized infrastructure using Upbound’s Platform. Official Providers for Upbound’s supported cloud platforms including AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure and can be found in the Upbound Marketplace.

Getting Started

Interested partners can visit Upbound Partners to learn more, join the Upbound Partner Program, and register for co-selling opportunities.