An Update on Upbound’s Official Providers

February 25, 2025

Read time: 4 mins

Craig D Wilhite

Today, we’re announcing a further refinement of the Upbound Official program that clarifies how the Crossplane community can access open-source stable builds of providers maintained by Upbound.

Recently, we shared details about upcoming changes with our Official Providers, and the community’s feedback has been invaluable. Your insights reinforce the passion surrounding Crossplane and Upbound’s role in its ecosystem. We sincerely appreciate the trust you place in us as we work toward a sustainable model that balances the needs of the Crossplane community with Upbound’s long-term ability to contribute and innovate.

Strengthening the Official Providers Program

Upbound remains committed to maintaining key providers — including AWS, Azure, GCP, and more —that serve as a foundation for the Crossplane community. In collaboration with the Crossplane Steering Committee, we’re making fundamental changes to the Official Providers program. These updates build on recent governance improvements to strengthen Crossplane’s community-driven ecosystem while raising the bar for provider quality and maintenance.

In this blog, we’ll explain how these changes relate to each other, what they mean for users of our Official Providers, and how they impact the broader Crossplane community. We aim to provide clarity and continue supporting a thriving, open ecosystem.

Thank you for being part of this journey. We’re excited about what’s ahead and grateful for your continued support.

Crossplane Community Extension Governance Changes

Upbound has worked closely with the Crossplane community to establish higher quality standards for community-contributed extensions. As outlined in Bassam's blog post, these changes include:

Ensuring all extensions contributed to the crossplane-contrib GitHub organization remain actively maintained and freely accessible to the community.
Requiring that builds be published to a new vendor-neutral OCI repository, ghcr.io/crossplane-contrib, and proxied via xpkg.crossplane.io at a minimum. Other registries, like the Upbound Marketplace, remain optional for these extensions.

Upbound has donated the source code for many of our Official Providers to the Crossplane community. We lead by example by ensuring that the repositories we maintain in github.com/crossplane-contrib comply with these new policies.

What This Means for the Community

The community can expect:

Free monthly versioned releases of crossplane-contrib providers maintained by Upbound under an Apache 2.0 license.
Published to xpkg.crossplane.io/crossplane-contrib/ (GHCR) and xpkg.upbound.io/crossplane-contrib/ (Upbound Marketplace).

Introducing Upbound Official Providers

Upbound Official Providers are commercially licensed builds of Crossplane providers. They are downstream commercial distributions from upstream open-source providers (such as provider-family-aws).

Upbound builds and supports these commercial providers, publishing them under the Upbound organization. Official Providers bundle enterprise-grade value, including:

Multi-language resource schemas (KCL, Python, and more coming soon) for an improved Crossplane composition authoring experience.
Long-term support, with 12 months of mainstream support plus 6 additional months of backporting for security and critical fixes.
Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for enhanced security and compliance.
Digitally signed releases by Upbound.
Commercial support from Upbound.

Official Providers offer the best Crossplane provider experience, fully integrated with the Upbound platform. To access an Official Provider, users must either purchase a subscription to Upbound or create a free Individual account for limited access.

A Tale of Two Images

To illustrate the distinction between an Official Provider and a community provider, let’s take the example of provider-upjet-aws:

Community Provider: The open-source version resides in crossplane-contrib, with Upbound as the maintainer. We release minor versions when new features are added and issue patch releases for bug fixes. These are published to
- GitHub Container Registry (GHCR): xpkg.crossplane.io/crossplane-contrib/
- Upbound Marketplace: xpkg.upbound.io/crossplane-contrib/provider-family-aws
- Free and accessible without a subscription.
Official Provider: A downstream, commercial version built from the same upstream source. Upbound adds enterprise value such as long-term support and backports for older versions (e.g., backports for v1.10.1 released in February and v1.13.2 through v1.17.2 in December). These builds are:
- Published exclusively to xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/provider-family-aws.
- Require a subscription.

See the illustration below for upjet-provider-aws

What Should Existing Users Do?

If you’re currently using Official Providers, here are your options:

Existing Upbound customers: If you're an existing Upbound customer who's already made the authentication changes required to continue pulling Official Providers, you don't have to do anything.
Purchase a subscription: Continue using Official Providers with full Upbound support and access to additional tools that accelerate Crossplane composition development.
Use Individual tier access: If you’re not ready for a paid subscription but still want to try the Upbound Platform Builder tooling, you can use the latest release of an Official Provider by creating an Individual tier account.
Use new free releases from crossplane-contrib: If you don’t need enterprise features, you can switch to the free, open-source releases published under the crossplane-contrib organization.

Switching to Community Providers

To migrate from an Official Provider to the equivalent community provider, update your provider pull string:


apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
 name: provider-azure-compute
spec:
 package: xpkg.upbound.io/crossplane-contrib/provider-azure-compute:v1.11.1

A step-by-step migration guide is available in Upbound’s documentation.

Upbound Marketplace and GHCR

As announced in collaboration with the Crossplane Steering Committee, we are committed to ensuring Crossplane has a healthy, vendor-neutral ecosystem. To reinforce vendor neutrality, Upbound is leading the effort to make crossplane-contrib provider releases available at GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) under ghcr.io/crossplane-contrib.

Additionally, Upbound-built provider images (both Official Providers and community ones) will continue to be available in the Upbound Marketplace. We’re also working on exciting features to improve discoverability and usability within the Marketplace.