New from Upbound: Release of Spaces v1.1, Improved Resource Events Stream

October 9, 2023

Sam Alipio

Our product update this week features an enhancement to Upbound Console designed to help you explore and filter resource-level events when debugging, as well as a rundown of the major changes included in the newest release of Upbound Spaces. There’s plenty of goodness packed into Spaces v1.1 – including external secret store support, auto-scaling control planes, and expanded compatibility with up CLI.

Release of Upbound Spaces v1.1

Spaces is a feature of Upbound that allows you to run managed control planes in your own self-hosted environments — whether that be on AWS, Azure, GCP, or on-prem. This week, we’re excited to announce the release of Spaces v1.1.

External Secret Store support comes to Spaces

Starting with managed control planes running in Spaces, you can now install and use the External Secrets Operator. ESO is a well-known tool in the Kubernetes ecosystem that enables you to sync secrets from an external source (such as Vault) to your cluster. It’s a natural fit to enable managed control planes the option to use ESO to sync privileged information for use by the control plane.

We’re working on bringing this capability back to managed control planes when run in Upbound’s SaaS environment. Read the docs to learn how to get started with ESO on a managed control plane running in a Space.

Auto-scaling control planes

Managed control planes remove the need for platform teams to manage the underlying lifecycle or infrastructure of Crossplane. We’re shipping the first phase of expanded auto-managed capabilities. In Spaces v1.1, managed control planes now automatically scale according to the number of CRDs installed on each managed control plane.

If you have a control plane that requires a lot of Crossplane providers, the managed control plane autoscales to match. Inversely, if you need a control plane that only has one or two providers, Spaces will automatically scale them down, so you can bin-pack more control planes into a given Space.

up CLI compatibility with Spaces

We’re expanding the number of commands in the up CLI that are compatible with interacting with a Spaces install. Previously, you could only use up to manage the installation of a Space. Now in up v0.20.0, you can create new profiles in up that have a context for a Space. This allows you to use up ctp to create, manage, and delete managed control planes in a Space right from the CLI.

Improved resource details drawer and events stream

When debugging the API calls flowing through your control planes, being able to easily view and filter down events can speed up the process of identifying the probable cause of an issue. The events being emitted by a given resource paint a picture of when and why things might have gotten stuck.

Our users have shared that they love how quickly they can use Upbound Console to debug resources compared to kubectl, but sifting through a large number of events to find those that are most relevant has remained a pain. In the latest release of Upbound, we’ve acted on this feedback and enhanced the resource details drawer to help you better assess the health of a claim, composite, or managed resource.

Now instead of events being displayed in-line with the rest of the resource’s details such as status conditions, they are contained in a dedicated tab with new functionality. You can sort resource events by age, filter them by status (for example, to view only warnings), as well as toggle on automatic refreshing of the stream. In addition, we’ve improved the presentation of key information about each resource by adding a heading section with important details such as status, type, API, and namespace.

Improvements & Fixes

Resolved a bug in the control plane explorer list view that resulted in claims incorrectly displaying an unhealthy status even when they were both synced and ready.
We changed a permission in Upbound to now allow users to delete secrets in the default namespace of a managed control plane.
We fixed an issue that prevented the bring-your-own-controller pattern from patching events.
We upgraded the version of Crossplane installed in all managed control planes to UXP v1.13.2-up.2.

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?

Are you intrigued by the idea of offloading the toil of managing Crossplane at scale to Upbound, but hesitant to explore our SaaS offering due to your org's security or compliance restrictions? Check out our one-pager to learn more about why running Upbound Spaces might be right for you, especially if you have rigorous compliance and data sovereignty requirements for your internal developer platforms (IDPs) and cloud-native Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).