We’re pleased to announce the release of the Upbound Crossplane Architecture Framework, available today at Upbound docs. This framework is geared for architects, platform teams, administrators, and other cloud practitioners who are building platforms on Crossplane. It provides recommendations and describes best practices, culminating from the collective expertise of many of the engineers who are helping build Crossplane. We’ve found it can be hard for Crossplane users to make the leap from “I can use a control plane to provision a simple bucket in my preferred hyperscale cloud provider” to “how do I plan for running a production-ready platform with Crossplane?” We think this framework will be a good starting point for bridging that gap.

What’s Inside

This framework is organized into three sections of content:

• Constructing custom APIs defines a set of best practices for how organizations should approach building custom APIs using Crossplane compositions and configurations. The upstream Crossplane docs are a great place to go to find general technical explanations for all the intricacies of a given Crossplane feature; in this section, we apply best practices for taking those Crossplane building blocks and using them to create your own custom APIs.
• Architecting with control planes defines a set of viable design patterns that can be used when architecting with control planes. We believe there’s a baseline architecture you can use for a single control plane, and if you have a need to run multiple control planes, you can tweak them in a few ways.
• Interface integrations provide baseline recommendations for integrating with common control plane interfaces (frontends, monitoring, etc). Crossplane exists in the Kubernetes ecosystem, which means you can take advantage of specialized Kubernetes-native tooling. We’ve talked with hundreds of customers about the platforms they’re building with Crossplane and we see themes concerning platform integrations come up time and again. This section distills our learnings on what it means to integrate core components with Crossplane.

How to get started

If you are brand new to Crossplane, we recommend you start first with the upstream Crossplane quickstart guide. Once you are familiar with the core concepts and want to start mapping out how to transform Crossplane from a technology to a production-ready solution, check out the framework.

Once you begin thinking about what it means to go to production with Crossplane, it’s helpful to have a sense of what your objectives and key results are, and what business requirements come into play. We created a self-eval guide to get you into the right frame of mind to begin answering these questions. We recommend you start there.

What’s Next

There’s a lot more content on the roadmap we want to share with you in terms of Crossplane + production best practices. We have more content planned and will release new iterations of the framework over the coming months. If you have feedback, an idea for a best practice you think should be included in the framework, or want to chat with the Product team, you can find us in the #Upbound channel of the Crossplane community Slack.

Learn More

We're covered this all in depth in our webinar, //TODO Enable Developer Self-Service Using Kubernetes and Control Planes Powered by Crossplane, with the Linux Foundation. Check it out to learn all about it!