Seattle, WA, May 18, 2021 — The era of control planes starts today. Upbound, the company that created the open source Crossplane project and donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), today launched the first enterprise-grade distribution of Crossplane. The distribution, called Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP), is designed to help enterprises adopt a universal control plane, moving beyond infrastructure as code to significantly increase automation, reduce costs and enable developer self-service to accelerate the pace of innovation.
UXP is the first open source, vendor-supported distribution of Crossplane with enterprise-grade support. Existing Crossplane deployments can easily upgrade to UXP and take advantage of its features, including connecting to Upbound Cloud for simplified management and real-time observability. UXP is available today via GitHub and numerous marketplaces, including AWS Marketplace and OperatorHub, with other marketplace listings coming soon.
Upbound Announces GA of Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry
Upbound today also announced the general availability of Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry products, after a year in public preview. To reach this milestone Upbound has been working with current enterprise customers in diverse sectors, including banking and financial services, technology and electronics, internet and software, public sector, and retail.
An early adopter of Upbound is Plot.ly. The company is in the process of migrating its application configuration stack and workflows from HashiCorp’s Terraform to UXP to take advantage of increased automation and API-centric integration with their services.
“We see control planes as the future of infrastructure automation,” said Jack Parmer, CEO and co-founder at Plot.ly. “We chose Upbound as our partner in this important transformation because they created Crossplane and offer enterprise-grade products and services that will help us accelerate time to market.”
Upbound Cloud offers a single point of control for both platform teams and application teams. Platform teams can easily create and manage control planes that connect to all infrastructure they are managing across different cloud and infrastructure vendors. The control planes enable application teams to self-service infrastructure, while ensuring that all security, compliance, and cost controls are enforced. The Upbound Cloud console enables platform teams to easily manage access, apply security policies and inspect infrastructure for security and configuration risks. It supports self-hosted and cloud-hosted deployments of UXP, offering flexibility to enterprises with differing security and compliance requirements.
Upbound Registry is a free community library for teams adopting Crossplane and UXP. Users can discover, publish and share Crossplane providers and configurations, and they can easily install them into their UXP deployments with a free Upbound account. Upbound Enterprise customers unlock unlimited private listings, making Upbound Registry the best place to centrally manage infrastructure configuration across their entire organization.
“Crossplane is the modern, cloud-native alternative to Infrastructure as Code, and it’s the future of managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale,” said Bassam Tabbara, founder and CEO of Upbound. “Today, we’re giving enterprises the products and services they need to move off of managing templates and move to API-centric control planes. We’ve been working with enterprise customers and the community for a few years now, and we’re excited to bring Upbound to the enterprise market.”
Upbound Subscription Options
Upbound’s product offerings are available via a subscription model that currently has two tiers. The first is a free tier catering to individuals getting started with control planes and who need tooling to debug and share their Crossplane providers and configurations. It includes full access to UXP, the ability to publish public listings in Upbound Registry, and limited access to Upbound Cloud.
Upbound’s enterprise tier unlocks additional value across the product portfolio. Platform teams can manage unlimited control planes in Upbound Cloud, create unlimited private listings in Upbound Registry, and get access to 24/7 support, prioritized bug fixes, implementation services, onboarding and training.
“We’re glad someone is finally building something like Upbound Cloud, as it offers us a managed service backing an open source API to provision and manage infrastructure,” said Jan Willies, Platform Architect at Accenture. “Cloud infrastructure was missing a common API, and it’s something we’ve seen a huge demand for. We’re excited about Upbound Cloud, as it has the potential to simplify how our software developers manage the life cycle of our application portfolios, allowing us to innovate more quickly.”
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Building on Crossplane Project Momentum
Today’s launch comes on the heels of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe where cloud-native and industry leaders spoke at Crossplane Community Day about converging on the approach of using Kubernetes to do more than just manage containers. Enterprises are looking for a comprehensive cloud-native operating model which modernizes infrastructure management and accelerates development velocity through safe and automated infrastructure self-service.
Crossplane was the first open source project to recognize Kubernetes for its control plane, and not as a container orchestrator, and has been leading the effort to democratize control plane technology in the cloud-native community. Crossplane was released in 2018 and has reached v1.0 maturity within 2 years. Tabbara wrote about the universal control plane as “Kubernetes’ true superpower” recently. The project is hosted at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and is currently in the process of moving to incubation status with tremendous support from the community. Crossplane providers are available for AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, VMware, Equinix and many others. Crossplane plays a critical role in enabling the GitOps operating model that is seeing wide adoption in the cloud-native community.
About Upbound.io
Upbound is the creator of open source Crossplane—the modern, cloud-native alternative to Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Our mission is to enable a new era of infrastructure management that is automated, reliable, efficient and empowers application teams to self-service and deliver software faster, accelerating innovation. Upbound is a leader in the Kubernetes ecosystem and a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Follow Upbound on Twitter and GitHub.
