Insights from KubeCon SLC 2024: Crossplane Innovation, Upbound DevEx Highlights & More

Last week, I had the privilege of representing Upbound at KubeCon in Salt Lake City. The energy was palpable. It's a privilege to engage with so many attendees and hear about the real-world problems they're trying to solve in their day-to-day lives. Finally, the momentum around Crossplane and Upbound is unmistakably strong. With so many wonderful interactions, I left more excited than ever about the road ahead.

Highlights and Key Takeaways

Excitement Around Our New DevEx Features

The new development experience we shipped recently resonated deeply with attendees. Demonstrating Upbound's control plane project-based end-to-end (E2E) experience and finishing demos by emphasizing that these capabilities are available today—for free—through our Individual tier was received very well by Crossplane community members.

1. One particularly memorable moment was a demo to a team who shared with me how they're deciding whether to take the plunge with Crossplane. According to them, the new development experience, “is a game changer.”
2. The visible excitement from boothgoers was invigorating, and one platform engineer concluded with, “Yeah, we have to get this.”

Growing Interest in "Bare Metal" Orchestration

Now more than ever, organizations are evaluating what levers they can pull to reduce costs, especially in the Cloud where runaway resources tend to drive up an organization's bill. I personally experienced a noticeable uptick in questions about orchestrating non-cloud or "bare metal" resources with Crossplane. 

If you're looking into using Crossplane to manage non-cloud resources, I'd be very interested to have a chat with you. You can find me on the Crossplane community slack.

Organizations are replatforming - again!

The trend continues with organizations attempting to replatform. Both from the point of view of questions asked by attendees at our booth, as well as scanning vendors on the showfloor. Organizations are continuing to search for a goldilocks solution that doesn't lock them into an overly opinionated PaaS, yet saves them from having to build an entire platform themselves. 

Upbound the product lets users build their own cloud platform above the clouds (and soon it sounds like on-prem datacenters, too!) and tailor their platform to fit their needs, without needing to reinvent the core ingredients vital to a platform: namely a control plane, IAM, observability, operational experiences, and a framework (thanks to Crossplane) for defining the custom APIs offered by your platform.

The Upbound & Crossplane Experience on the KubeCon Floor

From Wednesday through Friday, I spent all my time at the Upbound booth, which was very active. While I missed Platform Engineering Day on Tuesday, it was clear throughout the week that Crossplane was making a significant mark across sessions, conversations, and collaborations. The same held true for Argo, which also drew considerable attention. The Crossplane booth was also just as busy with great conversations about building with the project. 

A ton of conversations surrounded all of the new core platform features we released only a week prior to the conference. Most of the people who stopped by the booth were excited to get started right away with our latest and newest Individual tier, which is forever free. 
Viktor spent some time signing some of his books with his fans. For anyone who didn’t get one, you can get a digital version from Upbound for free here. We also had the time to chat about some other fun things like the wifi and coffee.

Notable Conversations and Insights

Collaboration with Diagrid and DAPR

We enjoyed substantial energy and positive vibes from the Diagrid team (championing Dapr, which just graduated CNCF) and found alignment in a “better together” story with Crossplane. We also had the opportunity to host a fun party with them, which we had a few hundred Crossplane, Dapr, Diagrid, and Upbound lovers attend.