New from Upbound: Query API, reconciliation controls, and Spaces 1.6

This month’s product feature roundup is here. This update covers new features available today in the Upbound console, improved in-package resource search in the marketplace, and new features shipping in the core of the Upbound platform with Spaces 1.6. Let’s get started!

Query across control planes with the new Query API

We're pleased to announce the release of the Query API, an API available only in Upbound Product that's built for interacting with control planes. It's available today for customers running in Cloud Spaces and coming soon for customers deploying their own self-hosted Spaces.

Here are a couple ways the Query API accelerates various tasks performed by Crossplane users. First, the Upbound Console offers new resource management views powered by the API. Use the new views to view and debug claims (XRCs), composites (XRs), and managed resources (MRs) running on your control planes.

The Query API is very fast, returning results on a control plane in near real-time. Contrast this with kubectl get managed, which can take minutes to enumerate all managed resources on a control plane due to how the Kubernetes API server is built:

One of the powers of the new Query API is its ability to operate over multiple control planes at once. Here's the same query, but executed against multiple control planes in a Space:

You can use the Query API indirectly via Console and up CLI, or you can craft your own queries directly. Check out the product docs to learn more about how to write your own queries and make sure to grab the latest version of up (v0.32.0).

Reconciliation Controls

One of the major capabilities users get with Upbound is that it's always reconciling the state of the world against your declared desired state. But situations may arise where human intervention is called for and you need to pause continual reconciliation.

With the new API, spec.crossplane.state introduced to Upbound control planes, it's now possible to pause Crossplane and provider workloads running on control planes. This can be useful to:

1. "Break glass" and pause a control plane temporarily to conduct manual remediation in the external service its reconciling
2. Be an aid during development of compositions and pause reconcile of an individual composite resource (XR) on a control plane. This lets you make tweaks to what the XR is composing without needing to fight with Crossplane.

We've added the ability to easily interact with these new APIs right from the Upbound Console.

SharedTelemetryConfigs come to Cloud Spaces

Upbound offers a built-in feature to help users collect and export logs, metrics, and traces for everything running in control planes. Upbound provides an integrated observability pipeline built on the OpenTelemetry project that users configure by creating SharedTelemetryConfigs. Like other experiences in Upbound, this capability can be applied to multiple control planes in a group at a time.

We're pleased to announce this feature is now available in Upbound-hosted Cloud Spaces. Additionally, if users have enabled the observability feature in their self-hosted Spaces, they now have access to a Console experience to inspect drill into how their telemetry collection is configured. Users can use SharedTelemetryConfigs to collect logs and metrics, then send them to any number of otel-compatible solutions such as Datadog, New Relic, and more.