Introducing Upbound Crossplane 2.0 — The AI-Native Control Plane for the Agentic Era
August 14, 2025
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Today we're introducing Upbound Crossplane 2.0, our AI-native distribution of Crossplane, built on the brand-new Crossplane 2.0 release.
Upbound Crossplane extends the proven Kubernetes control plane model with intelligent capabilities that add assistance and optimization to your infrastructure operations, whether working with human operators, AI assistants, or autonomous agents. It provides the foundation for building intelligent infrastructure platforms that run safely and predictably while continuously improving.
Why AI-Native Control Planes
Software development already moves at AI speed. Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot produce production-ready code in minutes. Yet most infrastructure platforms still run at human speed, coordinating across GitOps repositories, Terraform pipelines, ticket queues, and manual review processes.
This gap limits delivery velocity and reduces the benefit of AI-accelerated development. AI agents cannot navigate fragmented systems the way humans do. They require a unified control point with complete context: desired declarative state, actual operational state, policy enforcement, embedded knowledge, and intelligence to operate effectively.
Upbound Crossplane 2.0 delivers exactly this unified control plane. Read more about the approach in the intelligent control plane paper.
Built on Crossplane 2.0
Crossplane 2.0 released today introduced a simpler, sharper control plane that includes:
- Unified infrastructure and application lifecycle management
- Namespaced composite resources for better isolation
- Declarative Day 2 automations with Operations
- More granular control with Managed Resource Definitions
Upbound Crossplane builds directly on these capabilities, adding AI-native extensions, enterprise tooling, and managed delivery options to help platform teams put intelligent control planes into production faster.
What’s New in Upbound Crossplane 2.0
1. Embedding AI in the Control Plane
We're adding intelligence directly into the control plane. You can now integrate Claude and OpenAI into Crossplane operations.
This enables your control plane to:
- Audit resource configurations for compliance using plain English policies
- Detect application issues like OOM crashes and recommend fixes
- Dynamically scale resources based on learned performance patterns
- Incorporate business context when making operational decisions
Intelligent Controllers leverage Crossplane 2.0's new Operations capability, combined with optional AI model integrations via the Model Context Protocol.
2. Control Plane Project Tooling + Web UI
Upbound Crossplane ships with control plane project tooling, the same development lifecycle tools we pioneered in Upbound Spaces, now available anywhere.
Projects integrate with your IDE for linting, autocomplete, inline definitions, and AI-powered authoring. Combined with bundled resource schemas and multi-language support, they make control plane development as smooth as application development.
We've also bundled a Web UI for Crossplane, an out-of-the-box interface to explore, debug, and learn your control plane without digging through YAML and kubectl.
3. Tested, Reliable, and Secure Official Packages
Upbound Crossplane includes access to Official Packages: curated, tested providers, functions, and configurations maintained by Upbound. This release includes:
- Oracle Cloud (OCI) provider joins the lineup
- New community providers: Databricks, Snowflake, Datadog, Honeycomb, Elastic Cloud
Note: Starting with v2, Official Packages require Upbound Crossplane (free or commercial). Previous versions continue to work with OSS Crossplane, and community-maintained packages remain available at xpkg.crossplane.io and include support for namespaced resources. This approach balances community access with the differentiated experience we are building in Upbound Crossplane 2.0.
The Upbound Marketplace helps you discover compatible content, see where it runs, and understand its properties at a glance.
4. Hardened for Production
Commercial licenses unlock runtime features designed for the largest, most demanding control planes:
- Provider vertical pod autoscaling
- Scale-to-zero for functions, powered by Knative
- Integrated backup and restore for Crossplane control planes
These features ensure Upbound Crossplane runs with maximum performance, cost-efficiency, and recoverability in production.
How to Get Started
You can run Upbound Crossplane 2.0 in two ways:
Self-managed: Deploy into your own Kubernetes cluster today.
Managed: Run inside Upbound's managed control plane service (Spaces), coming soon.
Starting today:
- Community plan (free forever) users can run Upbound Crossplane all the way to production
- Standard plan users can purchase commercial licenses for enhanced runtime, premium support, and deeper Upbound platform integrations
Download Upbound Crossplane 2.0 or contact our team to learn more.
The Path to Autonomous Infrastructure
Upbound Crossplane 2.0 represents more than an upgrade. It provides the foundation for building infrastructure platforms that operate with the same speed, precision, and adaptability as AI-accelerated development.
Organizations that unify their platform's desired declarative state, actual operational state, policy enforcement, knowledge, and intelligence today will deliver faster, adapt quicker, and build a competitive advantage as autonomy becomes the norm.
Meet Upbound Crossplane 2.0 — your control plane for the agentic AI era.