Recapping Upbound at KubeCon London 2025
April 24, 2025
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KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 has come to a close, and the Upbound team is back! Energized, inspired, and more committed than ever to advancing the future of Platform Engineering. We loved meeting many of you from engaging conversations at the Upbound booth and showcasing Crossplane v2 at the project pavilion kiosk to unforgettable fun moments at the Upbound & Diagrid party, this year’s KubeCon in London gave us the chance to connect deeply with the community, share our latest developments and get direct feedback on what's important to you.
Upbound made a strong showing at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, not just at the booth or the Crossplane kiosk, but also on stage. Several Upbounders delivered talks on the future of control planes, platform engineering best practices, and how we're evolving Crossplane and the broader ecosystem. In case you missed any of the sessions, here’s a quick roundup of what we shared with the community.
Choose Your Own Adventure: The Dignified Pursuit of a Developer Platform
Viktor Farcic, lead rapscallion at Upbound, and Whitney Lee, Senior Technical Advocate at Datadog, led a live, interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” session. The audience actively participated in building a developer platform using CNCF tools like Crossplane, Kyverno, Argo Workflows, and Backstage. The session, featuring real-time demos and community voting, offered practical insights on balancing complexity, self-service, and governance in modern platform engineering.
A Journey to Modernizing a Regulated Cloud Control Plane
Steven Borrelli, Principal Solutions Architect at Upbound, and Pranita Praveen, Head of Enterprise Multi-Cloud from Macquarie Group Pty Ltd, shared a compelling journey. They detailed Macquarie’s successful modernization of their cloud control plane using Crossplane. The session highlighted how they replaced fragmented pipelines with a GitOps-driven control plane on Kubernetes, leveraging CNCF tools such as Kubernetes, Crossplane, OPA Gatekeeper, and Argo. The transformation resulted in a unified, multi-cloud, developer-friendly platform that enabled secure and fast service provisioning across AWS, GCP, and Azure, significantly improving developer experience and operational efficiency.
Crossplane Intro and Deep Dive – the Cloud Native Control Plane Framework
Crossplane leaders Jared Watts, founding engineer at Upbound, and Nic Cope, Senior Principal Engineer at Upbound, introduced the Crossplane project. They showcased its latest features, explored how to build production-ready control planes, and gave a preview of Crossplane v2. The session highlighted the key features of Crossplane v2, including namespaced Composite and Managed resources, as well as support for any Kubernetes resource in Compositions. These features make it easier to build APIs not just for infrastructure, but also for applications and services. With backward compatibility, Crossplane v2 empowers teams to create a more intuitive, flexible, and developer-friendly internal platform. The team is now seeking community feedback on this exciting new release.
The Past, the Present, and the Future of Platform Engineering
Viktor Farcic, lead rapscallion at Upbound, joins Mauricio Salatino, Software Engineer at Diagrid, to deliver a talk that covers the journey through the history of platform engineering; why past attempts failed, what has changed today, and whether we are finally set up for success. Covering the evolution of platform engineering from early scripting to Docker, to today’s Kubernetes-based control planes, showing how patterns from cloud giants now guide internal platforms. It emphasized the importance of APIs and community collaboration to build developer-friendly platforms.
Are You Ready for Platform Adoption, or Are You Setting Yourself Up for Failure?
Ana Margarita Medina, Staff Developer Advocate at Upbound, joined Whitney Lee, Senior Technical Advocate at Datadog, Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer at Syntasso, and Leena Mooneeram, Senior Platform Engineer at Chainalysis. This fun-filled panel leveraged clickbait-style headlines and candid stories to cover the most common platform engineering adoption mistakes, from confusing portals with platforms to ignoring feedback and business outcomes. With humor and hard truths, the speakers emphasized the importance of self-service APIs, observability, documentation, and product thinking in building platforms that developers want to use.
Thank You
From thought-provoking talks to hallway chats and after-hours connections, KubeCon Europe 2025 was an incredible reminder of why we love being part of the cloud native community. We’re grateful to everyone who stopped by to talk about Platform Engineering, control planes, and Crossplane’s future. We’re even more excited about what’s next and look forward to seeing many of you at KubeCon North America 2025.
If any of the talks sparked ideas or questions, or if you’re ready to dive deeper into building with Upbound and Crossplane, we’d love to hear from you. Until next time! 👋🏼