Upbound Contributes Control Plane Provider Technology to the Crossplane Project, Governed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

SEATTLE, WA — September 19, 2023 — To accelerate the thriving open source ecosystem around control planes, Upbound, the company behind the popular open source project Crossplane, today announced it is donating the core projects powering its official providers for AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) under the Crossplane project. With these essential building blocks added to the open source CNCF project, the platform engineering community can work together in a future-proof manner, unified to build common integrations to make it easier to use Crossplane control planes with any cloud and vendor.

“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.”

Crossplane is a framework for platform engineers to build control planes. It sits above any environment or cloud and helps engineers customize the APIs they expose so their developers have a simpler, safer, self-service interface that adheres to their organization’s needs. Engineers use providers, or integrations, in the Marketplace to manage cloud resources and services. To help engineers create more mature providers and save time, Upbound created code generation technology that produces Crossplane providers. Upbound uses this technology to maintain its 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.

“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.

With these projects now governed under Crossplane and CNCF, users can boost their confidence to build with Crossplane more effortlessly and remove any doubt about the future viability of these critical components. They can use and build with fast automation of API documentation and example configurations, benefiting the community of thousands of engineers building control planes.

“Upbound remains a critical maintainer and steward of the Crossplane project and we believe in supporting the provider ecosystem around Crossplane,” said Bassam Tabbara, creator of Crossplane and CEO of Upbound. “With this donation, we open up a path to the ecosystem to converge around providers all under the trusted governance of the Crossplane project and the CNCF.”

Community members and customers can access the free Marketplace to browse, use and collaborate on providers for Crossplane.

About Upbound

Upbound is democratizing the best-kept secret in cloud computing — the control plane. By leveraging custom APIs, cloud engineers are no longer hindered by configuration drift, multiplying workspaces and frustrated developers. With Upbound, platform engineers get centralized control, governance and stability and developers get the freedom of self-service.

Upbound is the creator and maintainer of the popular open source project Crossplane, a framework for building cloud-native control planes. The company is a Series B startup and has raised $69M in total funding. Upbound’s backers include GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital and Intel Capital. For more information, visit upbound.io.

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Media contact

Kelly Tenn
press@upbound.io