Universal Crossplane and Upbound General Availability

One year ago Upbound donated our open source project Crossplane to the CNCF and released Upbound Cloud Community Preview. In doing so, we took our first major step towards showing the world our vision of how Kubernetes was a paradigm shift, and could do much more than just orchestrate containers.

Today, after a year of learning from customers and seeing the Crossplane community’s control plane ideas go mainstream in the cloud-native community, we’re taking our next big step forward. We’re proud to announce several new products and features designed to help both individuals and organizations deploy control planes to production.

Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP) is our official enterprise-grade distribution of Crossplane. It’s a free, open source, fully conformant, downstream distribution of Crossplane which is tested and supported by the Upbound team. Our intent is to build tooling and enterprise features around the distribution which doesn’t neatly fit into Crossplane’s CNCF charter.

UXP optionally connects to Upbound Cloud for a real-time dashboard, and integration with Upbound Registry. With this launch, both Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry are now Generally Available and being used by Upbound customers to deploy control plane technology to production.

Lastly, we’re making all of our products free and easy for the Crossplane community to start using, and frictionless for customers to purchase. Individuals can create an Upbound account and get started for free to connect and manage a single UXP instance from Upbound Cloud. Individuals can also publish unlimited public listings to Upbound Registry as they build their own Crossplane Providers and Configurations.

Enterprises can upgrade to Upbound Enterprise for enterprise collaboration features, private Upbound Registry listings, unlimited UXP deployments, 24/7 support, implementation services, and more.

Create an Upbound account to get started, or continue reading to learn more.

Upbound - Bringing Control Planes Mainstream

If you attended KubeCon EU last month, you probably heard about control planes, and how the Kubernetes community needs to look beyond containers and pods. When we started Upbound in 2017, we saw how container orchestration was simply the first use case of Kubernetes, and that its real innovation was in the operating model it pioneered and the control theory which inspired it. This was the mission of Upbound from the start and what lead us to launch Crossplane in 2018 and start sharing these ideas publicly.

Over the past year, we saw a community form around Crossplane to apply the same cloud-native operating model that’s been applied to applications to the infrastructure which powers them, in ways we could only dream of in 2018. Crossplane solves the problems platforms teams have with legacy Infrastructure-as-Code tools which don’t have native day two operation abilities or broader integration with the Kubernetes ecosystem that now dominates their workflows.

As we worked with the rapidly growing Crossplane community, we saw first hand the need for organizations to have an “easy button” for bringing this control plane approach to production, much like how organizations initially struggled to deploy Kubernetes to production when it was first released.

Many users in the Crossplane community needed assurances and guarantees about project stability, security, and (if they were an enterprise) a vendor to back them up as they ran in production. We also saw users managing dozens of Crossplanes across clouds, data centers, and edge environments. Managing each instance through kubectl is inefficient and challenging at scale, and both individual hobbyists and SRE team leads needed tooling and UI to help reduce administrative load.

Upbound Universal Crossplane

Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP) is how we’re starting to address the needs of both the community, and Upbound customers who want to run Crossplane in production. UXP is a downstream distribution of Crossplane we’re building, testing, and supporting for our users.

Having a downstream distribution allows the Upbound team to ensure a baseline level of stability, security, and issue prioritized bug fixes the Crossplane community may not be able to approve as quickly. UXP is also open source and free, so the community can contribute and improve it as well as the tooling we’re building around it like the up CLI and xgql, a GraphQL API for the Crossplane Resource Model (XRM).

We’ll be writing more about UXP in the future, the community we envision around it, how Crossplane users can start contributing, and the role we see it playing in the ecosystem.

Install UXP for free today or view it on GitHub.

Upbound Subscriptions

With both Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry now being Generally Available, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to start using them. To start, we’re offering two tiers of Upbound subscriptions, one for individual Crossplane community members, and another for enterprises.

Upbound Community enables individual UXP users to connect a single UXP instance to Upbound Cloud for easy, real-time debugging and management, and allows users to publish their Crossplane Providers and Configurations to Upbound Registry to share with the rest of the Crossplane Community. Upbound Community is totally free and doesn’t require a credit card to sign up.

Upbound Enterprise provides organizations with a single pane of glass and real-time dashboards to all of their UXP instances running across clouds and on-premises. Operators can view, in real-time, all of the infrastructure provisioned through UXP, it’s status, and who provisioned it all through a single tool. Upbound Enterprise enables organizations to connect unlimited UXP instances, as well as create unlimited hosted UXP instances for worry-free management.

Learn more about our subscription offerings.

Give it a Try

We’re thrilled to see the broader cloud-native community adopt these ideas and deploy them in production with our products. Upbound has started a movement, and we’re eager for others to join us in making control planes as easy to deploy and use as possible.

The era of control planes has just begun, and you can get started today. Enroll in Upbound Community, or start your free Upbound Enterprise trial by creating an Upbound account.