Upbound Makes Multicloud a Reality with Crossplane, An Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

Upbound, the company who brought forward Rook, announced Crossplane, an open source multicloud control plane. Crossplane introduces workload and resource abstractions on-top of existing managed services to enable a high degree of workload portability across cloud providers. A single crossplane enables the provisioning and full-lifecycle management of services and infrastructure across a wide range of providers, offerings, vendors, regions, and clusters. The open source project is a community driven effort to provide the best of all clouds to organizations.

"By running workloads across cloud providers, organizations are able to improve availability, geographic presence, reach, as well as optimize cost and take advantage of differentiated services," said Bassam Tabbara, CEO of Upbound. "A critical component of a multicloud strategy is a control plane that is able to schedule and orchestrate portable workloads across cloud providers, regions, clusters and on-premises while still using best-of-breed managed services."

Crossplane supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud with more cloud providers and on-premises options coming soon. Based on the familiar Kubernetes API, Crossplane was built with the cloud native world in mind. Crossplane applies many of the lessons learned in container orchestration to multicloud workload and resource orchestration.

Crossplane includes:

• Workload portability across clouds – Manage portable workloads (container, serverless, others) and the resources they consume (databases, message queues, buckets, data pipelines, and others) across clouds and on-premises environments.
• A strong separation of concerns – Developers can consume resources without worrying about the details of how they are provisioned and managed, and administrators or infrastructure-owners can tightly control the details of the implementation and define policies.
• A workload scheduler – The scheduler factors in a number of criteria including capabilities, availability, reliability, cost, and performance while deploying workloads and their resources.
• Full lifecycle management of resources – A set of resource controllers are responsible for the entire lifecycle of resources including provisioning, health, scaling, failover, and actively responding to external changes that deviate from the desired configuration.
• High level of extensibility – Crossplane leverages tried and tested Kubernetes machinery to provide a high level of extensibility around APIs, resource controllers, schedulers, and other components. This empowers the open source community to build on-top of it easily.

"Crossplane has an opportunity to change the cloud industry as we know it," said Sid Sijbrandij, CEO and co-founder of GitLab. "Our customers are increasingly looking for a way to deploy their code across multiple cloud environments. The choices available today are too complex and vendor driven but with Crossplane the ability to orchestrate clouds becomes simple. We look forward to collaborating with them on this vision and as the first complex app running on Crossplane."

In recent years there has been an increased demand for running across cloud providers. By adopting a multicloud strategy, organizations have the ability to use the best of all clouds. In addition they can reduce costs, use differentiated managed services, increase geographic presence, take advantage of credits, avoid vendor lock-in, and meet strict compliance policies.

"We share the vision of having truly cloud agnostic managed services and Crossplane is an important step forward in this direction," said Spencer Kimball, CEO and founder of Cockroach Labs. "Crossplane will make it possible for organizations to take deeper ownership of where they want to run their services and how they manage their application data. Kudos to the Upbound team for architecting and delivering this critical, open source and community driven component of the cloud neutral future."

Join the mission to help make multicloud a reality. Visit the Crossplane GitHub repository here to begin contributing and providing feedback.