Upbound Elevates Platforming with Crossplane Through New Builder Tooling and New Core Platform Services

It's the eve of Kubecon in North America, and Upbound is celebrating by unwrapping a significant new release of capabilities. Chief among these are a brand new software development lifecycle (SDLC) for Crossplane with `control plane projects`, a raft of new core platform services that improve the security and robustness of control planes, and new free and low-cost access plans. Let's dig in.

Simplify Building for Crossplane with New Platform Engineering Tools

A long-standing wish of the Crossplane Community has been to improve developer tools. Just in time for Kubecon, Upbound is releasing tooling supporting a redesigned SDLC that treats Crossplane control planes as software projects. This includes new tools in the Up CLI for starting, scaffolding, and packaging projects, support for VSCode to enable code completion, linting, and schema validation, and a new live Crossplane testing service in the Upbound Cloud. Read our blog, Streamlining Platform Building with Crossplane: Working with with Upbound's New Platform Engineering Tools, which tours the new Crossplane development lifecycle.

Upbound is making these tools available for free to Crossplane users and customers. Whether you are building for open-source Crossplane, creating packages to share with the community, or are an Upbound customer, we invite you to try out these new platform engineering tools.

We’re introducing a new, free Upbound Individual Plan to facilitate accessing these tools. This plan gives you complete access to the new Upbound platform engineering tools for Crossplane, including the ability to run a managed Crossplane control plane for testing. It also allows you to share packages on the Upbound Marketplace for the community.

See Faster Time to Value with New Core Platform Services

A primary reason to use Upbound is that we manage your Crossplane control planes at scale and automatically integrate core platform services so you don’t have to build them. We’ve continued to build out the core platform services provided by Upbound to improve robustness and operability at scale.  New features include a consumer portal, the query API, and the telemetry collector.  

The Consumer Portal, available to users as a preview feature, is an out-of-the-box experience for your end-users, such as developers, to consume the resource compositions you define with Crossplane. Many of our customers provide self-service capabilities to their end users by connecting Upbound to GitOps flows or to internal developer portals (IDPs)  such as Backstage, Port, or Cortex.  The Upbound consumer portal provides a low-overhead alternative to provide a web console experience to your platform’s end-users when you do not have GitOps or a portal implemented and when your requirements are sufficiently met with RBAC and CRUD operations.  Or if you want to use its form experience to create a claim that you copy and submit into your GitOps flows, that works just as well.

Query API provides a single interface to view the state and objects across all your Crossplane instances running in your Upbound platform. When you have multiple control planes in production, the Query API is a faster and more intuitive alternative to writing Kubectl commands that challenge even the most experienced Kubernetes engineer. More importantly, the Query API helps your team efficiently support your Upbound cloud platform as it scales to provide more services for end-users.

Backup and Restore is now built-in for all control planes you run on Upbound. You can configure automatic schedules for taking snapshots of your managed control planes. You can restore data from these backups by making new control planes.

Telemetry collector is an export channel to your observability solution for logs and metrics from all your Crossplane instances.  It allows you to manage context tags centrally.  It's a faster and simpler alternative to installing observability agents into each of your control planes and figuring out tagging.

To make it easier for Crossplane users to access Upbound’s core platform services, we’ve created a new Upbound Team Plan. This plan allows up to 10 users to collaboratively build, deploy, and utilize multiple Crossplane instances in Upbound. The Team plan provides simple pay-as-you-go month-to-month pricing on an ongoing basis. The Team Plan is perfect for pilot projects and smaller platforms.

Improving Software Security of the Crossplane Ecosystem with Official Provider Updates

We’re announcing a major enhancement to the Upbound Official Providers available in the Upbound Marketplace.  To improve software security, we’ll now be releasing Official Providers with the following standards:

• Built from streamlined distroless images to reduce potential attack surface area
• Published with an SBOM to assist with vulnerability tracking and reduce software supply chain risks
• Upbound now signs packages that can be verified by Crossplane, Upbound, and any industry-standard tooling
• Upbound will release updates with fixes to CVEs within 7 days of notification

We are also making available FIPS-compliant versions of providers upon request by Upbound customers. New Upbound Official Providers include support for the Crossplane builder experience announced above.