New from Upbound: Finding content faster in the Marketplace, MCP Connector comes to Spaces

October 23, 2023

Craig D. Wilhite

In this sprint’s product update, we cover improvements to the Marketplace that will make it much easier to find the Crossplane content you need, the arrival of support for the managed control plane connector in a Spaces-managed control plane, and some additional features now in the up cli to make interacting with control planes easier.

Navigating the Upbound Marketplace faster

Browsing available providers, configurations, and API definitions just got a lot faster. Users should expect to see up to 50x faster page load times in the Upbound Marketplace, thanks to some recent changes we pushed. Whether you’re browsing the list of Crossplane providers or exploring the spec of a managed resource, it should be considerably faster to get where you need to go in the Marketplace.

We’ve also updated how search results in Marketplace to allow for more content to be shown on screen, depending on the size of device viewing the Marketplace.

Managed control plane connector now supported in an Upbound Spaces

Spaces is a recent feature of Upbound that allows customers to operate self-hosted environments for Upbound’s managed Crossplane control planes. When a managed control plane runs in a Space, you can now use the same MCP connector that we support in our SaaS environment.

The MCP connector is one of many interfaces you can use to interact with a Spaces control plane. It’s specifically designed to help you connect a Kubernetes app cluster to a managed control plane, so your dev team can bundle their app helm chart (destined for their app cluster) alongside Crossplane claims (destined for a managed control plane) and deploy it to their single app cluster context.

Learn more about how to set up the MCP connector in a Spaces-managed control plane by reading the documentation.

New capabilities in up CLI

We’ve made it simpler to connect and disconnect from a control plane’s API server. up ctp connect was re-introduced, with different experience. Invoking the command will now connect your kubectl directly to the target control plane. Any kubectl commands run in that terminal will be executed against the target control plane. To return to the previous context stored in your kubeconfig, simply run up ctp disconnect. Learn about this more in the latest up CLI release notes.

Improvements & Fixes

Improved the control plane dashboard and configuration list by making the table headers sticky, allowing you to scroll through longer lists without losing context
Resolved an issue affecting Configurations with dependencies on the latest releases of family providers that prevented users from creating new ProviderConfigs via the UI
The console now shows UI create hints on the control plane and configuration list screens for organizations with no control planes or configurations created.
We fixed the background color of the main navigation tabs to match the page.
The UI tabs in a managed control plane dashboard now link via url hash. For example, the settings tab renders as console.upbound.io/org/controlPlanes/org:ctp-name#resources)

If you have feedback, a feature you’d like to see, or want to chat with the Product team, you can find us in the #Upbound channel of the Crossplane community slack.

Want to Learn More?

To understand the full picture of Spaces, check out this webinar, "Managed Crossplane in your own environment with Upbound Spaces" that I put together to give a great overview and detailed rundown.