General Availability of Upbound puts Managed Control Planes Centerstage, Unlocks Crossplane at Scale

Today, we are announcing that Upbound is Generally Available, helping platform teams build, deploy, and operate control planes at scale powered by Crossplane.

Many organizations find themselves embarking on similar journeys; Whether it's building “golden paths”, “launch zones”, or “cloud infrastructure self-service” organizations are beginning to build their own internal developer platforms above the clouds–and they’re using control planes to power them. With managed control planes, Upbound enables organizations to operate control planes at scale.gener

Customers can begin using Upbound today and start a free trial of managed control planes and the other exciting features of the Upbound platform.

The benefits of Crossplane, the scalability of Upbound

Crossplane, the open source cloud native control plane framework that allows users to build control planes without needing to write code, continues to surge ahead and has been adopted by thousands of enterprises. At Upbound, we are working with a growing list of enterprise customers including American Family Insurance, BMW, and Millennium BCP to support their adoption of control planes.

Since launching a private preview of Upbound back in January, customers have told us how they don’t want to spend their bandwidth managing Crossplane–the underlying cluster and infrastructure required to power it, the lifecycle of the technology, nor building the in-house expertise to scale Crossplane on their own. Customers would rather focus on building custom APIs tailored to their business, which they’ll offer to their own development teams as a self-service platform. We’re launching Upbound to let customers offload the management of their control planes to Upbound.

Our Managed Control Planes (MCPs) were built from the ground up for performance, scalability, and full lifecycle management. Customers can depend on MCPs to scale to thousands of CRDs, allowing customers to use control planes to manage resources across as many cloud services as they desire. Upbound is built for the fleet-scale demands of modern enterprises, who are using control planes for different environments, teams, business units, and customers. MCPs make it practical for organizations to successfully operate tens–or even hundreds–of control planes.

Git-driven Control Plane Configurations

Managed control planes on Upbound are seamlessly integrated with Git enabling platform teams to standardize on Git for defining their API definitions and compositions and using Git PR flows to push changes to the control plane. At launch we support GitHub but others are coming soon.

A new Console designed for Platform Operators

Upbound’s Console gives platform teams a consolidated view to manage and operate their control planes, and all the resources under management. Platform teams can collaboratively manage their usage of Upbound, perform upgrade operations, and interact directly with their managed control planes.

The graphical explorer in the Console provides visibility into the resources under management. Users can debug issues, understand the relationship of the resources, and explore events being emitted by the various Crossplane resources. If a resource is unhealthy, Upbound provides a trace in the resource tree so customers can quickly pinpoint the problematic resource and resolve the issue.im

Everything that can be done in Upbound can also be done via the up CLI. You can even use provider-upbound to interact with Upbound in a Crossplane-native way enabling control plane federation scenarios. Users can also get direct access to their managed control planes so they can use common Kubernetes tooling like kubectl or their favorite cloud native tooling.

Powering developer facing GitOps Flows

MCPs on Upbound are designed to work flawlessly with developer-facing GitOps flows. We’re introducing a new MCP Connector that can easily be installed in any Kubernetes cluster and supports managing infrastructure and application resources in a single GitOps flow. Customers can use their favorite continuous deployment engines like Flux or Argo in tandem with the declarative power of git to drive the interaction with their control plane’s API.

Built for team collaboration

Using control planes to build and operate a cloud platform is a team effort. Upbound organization and team model lets multiple users collaborate together in a single environment in Upbound. Administrators can use Upbound’s role-based access control (RBAC) model to assign permissions to teams for MCPs.

Start building above the clouds today

You can get started building above the clouds with managed control planes on Upbound today. Upbound is available for users to start a free trial, and you can invite up to nine other team members into your trial organization to explore Upbound together. Head over to Upbound's docs to find the quickstart guides. For pricing and commercial information, contact Upbound sales. We’d love to hear from you and give you a live demo.