KubeCon North America 2024 Preview: Upbound and Crossplane Highlights

The latest Kubecon + CloudNativeCon for North America is just 1 week away and we are already buzzing with excitement here at Upbound and within the Crossplane community! I’ve personally never had the opportunity to visit Salt Lake City before, so I’m looking forward to discovering all it has to offer. We’ll just need to figure out how to squeeze that in alongside all the other incredible events and moments on the packed schedule that we’ll explore in this blog post. Let’s go!

Crossplane v1.18 Release

First up is the latest Crossplane release which literally came out just today! The v1.18 release is packed full of awesome features and enhancements, with the ever growing community contributing some very impressive work as usual. By far the biggest functional area where numerous investments were made was Crossplane’s package manager, which handles the full lifecycle of all extensions to Crossplane, e.g. providers, functions, and configurations. The package manager can now easily pull packages from private repositories throughout the dependency chain, upgrade dependencies automatically, as well as solving many long standing pain points reported by the community.

Upbound Making Your Platform Life Easier

We will have a ton of awesome Upbound product advancements to show off at Kubecon that make a giant leap forward for Developers and Platform Engineers building and scaling cloud-native services. The full announcement will be made in just two days, so while we won’t be including the details in this post, make sure to tune into the announcements live stream on Thursday and then come personally see it in action at Kubecon. The Upbound team will be available during the entire conference to show off the latest product features and help you build your production ready control plane.

Crossplane Countdown to Graduation Party with Dapr

If you haven’t already heard, we’re hosting a super fun party in Salt Lake City with our friends on the Dapr project on Thursday evening. The theme is a “Countdown to CNCF Graduation”, which both projects have worked really hard on to mature themselves and show they are ready for the highest level of maturity the CNCF offers. We’re hosting the party in a cool arcade bar with lots of games to play and food and drinks to share together. I’ll be on the hunt for the Simpsons arcade game and fellow Crossplane maintainer Nic Cope will surely be setting new records on whatever pinball games are available. Register here and come join us for a great evening!

Upbound’s Experts Pack the Schedule

At every Kubecon, and especially this one, I am amazed at the talent and expertise of my Upbound colleagues and the wealth of knowledge we have to share with the cloud native ecosystem. The Kubecon program selection committee seems to agree, as Upbounders are on the schedule with more than 10 talks across the co-located events and main conference, with even more talks about Crossplane from community members. No matter your experience and familiarity with Upbound and Crossplane, there will surely be something for you to learn. I’m particularly excited about my talk with Max Blatt from Accenture to kick off the very first day of content for the week at Platform Engineering Day on “Navigating the No-Code to Full-Code Spectrum - a Platform Engineering Journey”. Browse all our other talks on our Kubecon prep site and don’t forget to add them to your schedule!

See you in Salt Lake City

If you’re fortunate enough to come to Kubecon in person, I can’t stress enough how much we’re looking forward to seeing and chatting with you. Interacting with our customers and the community is by far the most rewarding experience of every Kubecon.

I’ll be there personally with the rest of the Upbound team, Crossplane maintainers, and community members to hang out and answer all your questions about Upbound, Crossplane, and building universal control planes. We welcome you to come chat with us in the following locations:

• The Upbound booth in the Solutions Showcase at booth Q6
• The Crossplane booth in the CNCF Project Pavilion at kiosk 1A every afternoon of the conference

If you can’t make it to Salt Lake City in person, we’re still looking forward to seeing you at the Elevate Platforming with Crossplane live stream, so don’t miss out! Otherwise, safe travels to everyone and we’ll see you very soon!