Introduction to Crossplane

Crossplane, a CNCF project, is an open-source Kubernetes add-on that extends any cluster with the ability to provision and manages cloud infrastructure, services, and applications using kubectl, GitOps, or any tool that works with the Kubernetes API.

With Crossplane you can:

✅ Provision & manage cloud infrastructure with kubectl

✅ Install Crossplane to provision and manage cloud infrastructure and services from any Kubernetes cluster.

✅ Provision infrastructure primitives from any provider (GCP, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, on-prem) and use them alongside existing application configurations.

✅ Version, manage and deploy with your favorite tools and workflows that you’re using with your clusters today.

✅ Publish custom infrastructure resources for your applications to use

✅ Define, compose, and publish your own infrastructure resources with declarative YAML, resulting in your own infrastructure CRDs being added to the Kubernetes API for applications to use.

✅ Hide infrastructure complexity and include policy guardrails, so applications can easily and safely consume the infrastructure they need, using any tool that works with the Kubernetes API.

✅ Consume infrastructure resources alongside any Kubernetes application to provision and manage the cloud services they need with Crossplane as an add-on to any Kubernetes cluster.

✅ Deploy applications using a team-centric approach with OAM

✅ Define cloud-native applications and the infrastructure they require with the Open Application Model (OAM).

✅ Collaborate with a team-centric approach with a strong separation of concerns:

✅ Infrastructure operators - provide infrastructure and services for applications to consume

✅ Application developers - build application components independent of infrastructure

✅ Application operators - compose, deploy, and run application configurations

✅ Deploy application configurations from app delivery pipelines or GitOps workflows, using the proven Kubernetes declarative model.