Upbound Contributes Control Plane Provider Technology to Crossplane

September 18, 2023

Bassam Tabbara

Today, from Control Plane Day with Crossplane, we announce an important update for the overall health of the Crossplane project.

We’re thrilled to donate 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 also 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 was created here at Upbound in 2018, and we donated this project to live under the CNCF soon after. As the framework for control planes we believe this keystone project, democratizing how the cloud providers manage their clouds to everyone, needed to live in the open source community with a clear governance model. An equal playing field is an instrumental foundation for vendors and customers to build confidently together. That’s the heart of open source. As the founder of Crossplane, I’m so proud of where we have come so far with hundreds of companies and thousands of engineers using it. Today marks another step on the path to bringing control planes to more people, expanding the ecosystem of tools to build providers and coalesce on providers so every engineer can build platforms with control planes.

Upjet and AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure Providers Moving to Crossplane

Upbound created code generation technology that produces Crossplane providers. Upbound uses this technology to maintain its official providers for AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Starting today, these projects will be moved to the official Crossplane project under the CNCF with a strong community-driven governance model.

The Upjet project and AWS, Azure and Google Cloud providers will now be hosted in github.com/crossplane-contrib and be subject to the governance of the Crossplane project. The move today opens a path for more convergence and rationalization of Crossplane providers all of which will now be discussed within the scope of the Crossplane project.

What the community has to say

Check out some comments from the community, including from the CNCF and Upbound partner Aviatrix.

“Open source foundations like CNCF ensure there is a level playing field for all participants, vendors and users alike, which in turn helps promote a truly healthy, growing ecosystem,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “With Upbound's contribution, the cloud-native ecosystem can trust that the Crossplane community remains a dependable and open platform to build upon.”

“Cloud ecosystems require open source communities to grow, but the pool of truly open source cloud automation tools is shrinking. This donation to the Crossplane project ensures that both the framework and the providers built on top of it remain open for all to use, and sets the stage for the Crossplane ecosystem to grow under the guidance of the CNCF,” said Mitch Connors, Senior Principal Engineer, Aviatrix.