What better way to kick off the new year than to reflect on the last one? Last year, we had some huge milestones that propelled Upbound and Crossplane forward in the cloud native space. From major product releases to important community contributions, there is much to recap. Looking forward, 2024 brings a new light on innovation as we build upon the foundation of our past achievements. It's in this retrospective moment that we find the essence of inspiration, knowledge, and strength to chart our course ahead.

2023’s Big Wins

Upbound Becomes Generally Available, Helping Platform Teams Scale And Simplify Crossplane

Though Crossplane can help any company streamline their cloud infrastructure, customers have told us how they don’t want to spend their bandwidth managing Crossplane, especially at scale.

In April of last year, we launched Upbound to let customers offload the management of their control planes to Upbound. Our Managed Control Planes (MCPs) were built from the ground up for performance, scalability, and full lifecycle management. You can depend on MCPs to scale to thousands of CRDs, allowing you to use control planes to manage resources across as many cloud services as they desire. We even released a 30-day trial with the product, which you can sign up for at no cost here.

New Provider Families are Released, Offering a Better Cloud Native Integration Experience for Crossplane

Since we released the official providers in 2022, our coverage of the most used resources for cloud-native deployments has quickly grown to 75%. As the number of resources in each official provider has increased, it is clear that no organization needs ALL those resources in one single provider.

With that in mind, we split up and organized the official providers into Provider Families or groups of smaller providers that more closely align to how platform teams actually use them in June. This reduced bloat, improved performance, and provided a path for future growth as the number of cloud resources grows on a seemingly daily basis. Check out the migration documentation and read the full update here to leverage the streamlined providers.

Upbound Achieves SOC 2 Type II Compliance, Strengthening Trust and Security

In July, we successfully achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance to showcase our unwavering commitment to ensuring the highest level of security, privacy, and data protection for our valued customers.

We also launched the Upbound Trust Center where companies can find a consolidated view of everything we are doing to validate our adherence to industry-recognized standards and best practices, providing peace of mind to businesses and organizations that entrust us with their critical data.

Leading the Partner Ecosystem for Crossplane, Upbound Establishes a New Partner Program

Also in July, we launched our Global Upbound Partner Program to support the rapidly growing ecosystem around Crossplane. The new program enabled partners to access Upbound’s products and services along with resources, technical expertise and go-to-market opportunities.

Some notable partners are Accenture, Akuity, Aviatrix, AWS, Azure, Datadog, Google Cloud, and more. Learn more about the partner program here.

Upbound Releases Spaces, Allowing You to Bring Managed Control Planes into Your Own Environment

We released a new feature of Upbound in September: Spaces. Upbound Spaces allows teams to run their own Upbound managed control planes in any hyperscale cloud provider or data center where compliance or data sovereignty is a concern.

With Spaces, users can self-host many managed control planes in a single Kubernetes cluster running in their own environment in addition to the Upbound managed environment that we offer today. You can get a demo of how it works here. Just say want to try out Spaces in the comment box!

Upbound Contributes Control Plane Provider Technology to Crossplane

At Upbound, we are committed to supporting the open-source landscape, particularly through the contributions we make to Crossplane. As such, we donated Upbound’s control plane provider technology, Upjet, to the open source Crossplane project so that it can be officially governed under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

With this, we are moving the providers for AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to the Crossplane project. Our goal is to accelerate the growth of the ecosystem around Crossplane and remove any doubt about the viability of the project especially in light of recent licensing changes in the industry.

Crossplane’s Biggest Release to Date, v1.14

With over 700 commits, Crossplane v1.14 is packed full of big features that will make Platform Engineers more productive and effective in building control planes to power their infrastructure. In particular, the beta release of Composition Functions is a game changer that allows teams to programmatically configure their infrastructure with familiar languages.

The velocity has only continued to increase as the project matures. Additionally, the community has recently reached an exciting milestone by surpassing over 10,000 members on Slack, so everything about the project continues to grow. See all the exciting progress in v1.14 here!

Other Highlights from 2023

As you might have seen in our numerous product update blogs, we’ve come out with a number of features to improve the Upbound and Crossplane experience. You’ll find that in only a year, we have released about 30 new product features in addition to what you’ve already read above. Here are some of the highlights:

November:

• Improved User Flow in the Control Plane Explorer
• Filterable Control Plane list in the dashboard
• New “Referenced By” section in the Resource Details drawer

October:

• Navigating the Upbound Marketplace faster
• Managed control plane connector now supported in an Upbound Spaces
• New capabilities in up CLI
• Release of Upbound Spaces v1.1
  • Auto-scaling control planes
  • up CLI compatibility with Spaces
  • External Secret Store support comes to Spaces
• Improved resource details drawer and events stream

September:

• A control plane explorer for fleet scale use
• Use Argo CD to target managed control planes in Upbound
• Offer Cluster-as-a-Service to your organization with configuration-caas

August:

• New provider management experience
• Streamlined configuration creation flow
• Declaratively create managed control planes
• Control Plane Dashboard Expanded View (up to 100 Control Planes)
• Single Table to View and Install Configurations
• Events Tab enhancements to View Crossplane Events

July:

• Viewing Crossplane Events in the Upbound Console
• Surfacing Configuration Installation Errors in Context
• Upbound Crossplane Architecture Framework Released

June:

• Upbound as an identity source with Azure
• ProviderConfig CRUD (Azure)
• New Azure-based configuration starters
• Skippable First Run Experience
• Global CRD searching in the Upbound Marketplace
• CRUDable ProviderConfigs
• Improved Control Plane Explorer

If you’d like to read more about any of them, you can see them all here.

Looking Forward to 2024

2023 was a busy year for us and we are sure 2024 will see more huge improvements led by feedback from our Upbound customers and the Crossplane community. It is increasingly clear that teams don’t want infrastructure to stand in the way of innovation while at the same time they need to meet security, compliance, and policy requirements. We believe that Upbound and Crossplane are the best way to meet these needs and the features that will come out in 2024 will help make companies' lives easier when deploying applications in cloud-native environments.

See It In Action

To see all of these wins in action, try out the product for yourself! We have a free 30-day trial you can sign up for here.