New from Upbound: Improving the scalability of the control plane explorer, integrate Argo CD with managed control planes

This week’s product update showcases the new-and-improved control plane explorer experience, built for platform operators managing resources at scale on their control planes. We also know customers love using Argo with Git to drive declarative resource creation, so we’ve introduced the ability for you to bring the same Argo flows you know and love to managed control planes in Upbound. Let’s dive into the latest goodies!

A control plane explorer for fleet scale use

Upbound’s managed control planes are designed to scale up to the most demanding user needs. For our customers who are deploying hundreds of claims and managing thousands of resources through a single control plane, we wanted to deliver a great operations experience in the Console to allow users to quickly identify problem resources, debug issues, and get to a resolution. We’re introducing a new List view experience in the control plane portal to supplement the current graphical view.

Users can use the new list view to quickly context switch between APIs on their control planes and see all claims against that API, sorting on the property that matters to you. We think this new experience scales much better for users with a lot of objects under management by their control plane.

Likewise, when a user clicks into a claim from the list view, the Console now presents a graph that is scoped down to only that claim. You can opt for a list view presentation of the resources associated with this claim, too. Again, this experience scales better for users who are interacting with claims that generated many children resources (composite resources and managed resources).

Hovering over a resource traces and animates the relational path through a claim, handy for debugging claims that compose nested compositions and nested managed resources. Each resource also has a highlight button you can select from the list view to help you more quickly identify a problematic resource within the graphical view.

Use Argo CD to target managed control planes in Upbound

Users can now use an external Argo CD cluster to assist in delivering Crossplane resource claims (XRCs) to their managed control planes in Upbound. The introduction of this feature supplements the options for using the MCP connector or Flux, bringing Upbound to 3 options for users to choose for integrating GitOps with their managed control planes. You can read the full instructions for configuring an external Argo CD cluster to interact with managed control planes in our docs.

Improvements & Fixes

• We fixed an issue with the MCP Connector where updates on a claim in an app cluster led to orphaned resources in the managed control plane.
• We added stability improvements for the native git integration available for managed control planes running in a Space.

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.

What’s Next?

If you want to take advantage of the platform we’re building in Upbound but you have compliance or security objections to using it as a SaaS platform, join me later this week in my upcoming webinar on September 28 @ 8 AM PT. We recently released a new feature of Upbound, called Spaces, that will allow you to take advantage of the Upbound platform, hosted entirely in your own cloud environment. It’s perfect for users who are building internal developer platforms (IDPs) and cloud-native Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) but have strict security/compliance requirements.

On behalf of the Upbound team,

Craig D Wilhite