The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced that the open source Crossplane project for providing a control plane framework that spans multiple IT platforms has reached a sufficient level of maturity to officially graduate.
Originally developed by Upbound, Crossplane surfaces a declarative set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing both applications and infrastructure in place of scripts or traditional IT tickets. There are now more than 3,000 contributors from over 450 organizations contributing to the project, with more than 1,000 organizations running it in a production environment, including Nike, Autodesk and NASA Science Cloud, according to the CNCF.
The Crossplane community is now focusing on improving the stability and usability of the control plane by maturing and hardening core APIs such as real-time compositions and managed resource activation policies. According to the CNCF, other priorities include expanding metrics, health reporting, and observability features to provide richer, real-time visibility into the state and performance of the control planes.
Upbound CEO Bassam Tabbara, one of the original developers of Crossplane, said the overall goal is to streamline the management of IT environments via a programmable framework that can be managed by platform engineering teams that are centralizing the management of IT operations.
Based on a control plane that was originally developed for Kubernetes clusters, Crossplane makes it possible to now manage clusters, virtual machines and applications in much the same way cloud service providers have been doing for the past decade. As IT environments have become more hybrid, IT teams have been adopting Crossplane to centrally manage what are becoming highly distributed computing environments.
Additionally, as more organizations move to adopt sovereign clouds, they are discovering the need for a control plane to unify the management of different classes of workloads that are being deployed across a diverse mix of on-premises IT environments, noted Tabbara.
It’s not clear exactly how widely adopted Crossplane is, but the ability to declaratively manage IT environments will only become more critical in the age of agentic artificial intelligence (AI), he added. The APIs that Crossplane exposes provide a consistent means for AI agents to declaratively execute the tasks assigned to them, said Tabbara.
There are, of course, now several options for deploying a control plane across a heterogeneous IT environment but with the backing of the CNCF the number of platform engineers exposed to Crossplane will continue to increase. The challenge right now for the Crossplane community is not so much the maturity of the project so much as it is the number of platform engineers that have the skills and expertise needed to deploy and manage it.
In the meantime, however, as platform engineering continues to gain traction the scope of the missions assigned to them is only going to increase. The simple truth is that as IT environments become more distributed there is a greater need to centralize management. Otherwise, it’s simply a matter of time before IT teams that are generally not getting any larger are simply overwhelmed.