New developer guide, CLI tooling and enhanced out-of-tree Infra Stacks (GCP, AWS, Azure) enables the community to add support for more cloud providers, managed Kubernetes offerings, and fully-managed cloud services that can be hosted in your cloud of choice.



The momentum keeps rolling forward with Crossplane community engagement around extending Crossplane to add support for additional cloud providers, managed Kubernetes offerings, and managed cloud services (DBaaS, Big Data, and more). It's a busy time for us and we're very excited to have such a collaborative community!

Here are just a few stats since the v0.2 release that show how quickly things are moving:

1.4K GitHub stars

105 GitHub forks

1,143 GitHub commits

241 Slack members

681 Twitter followers

There are so many changes in this release, we can't tell you about all of them in a single post. We'll give you the highlights here and then follow up with separate posts over the coming weeks, including all the details in the latest version of the crossplane.io/docs!

AWS, GCP, & Azure Stacks have moved out-of-tree

In this release we have enhanced the Infrastructure Stacks for GCP, AWS, and Azure to use a refined set of best-practices codified in a new crossplane-runtime and moved them out-of-tree where they can be extended or adapted by the community with different release schedules.

This enables the community to more easily extend existing Infrastructure Stacks and use them as a reference when building new Stacks that add support for additional cloud providers, managed Kubernetes offerings, and managed cloud services.

We're excited to be working with the community to add providers for Pivotal Kubernetes Service (PKS), CockroachDB, Yugabyte, and more.

Cloud networking & security from kubectl

Stacks for AWS, Azure, and GCP now support secure network connectivity between application deployments in a target cluster and the managed services they depend on. Crossplane now supports provisioning and life-cycle management of networks, subnets, security groups, and IAM policies from kubectl.

This includes:

GCP Stack: secure connectivity for GKE & CloudSQL, CloudMemStore, Buckets

AWS Stack: secure connectivity for EKS & RDS, ElastiCache, Buckets

Azure Stack: secure connectivity for AKS & AzureSQL, AzureCache, Buckets

This is an exciting step towards policy-driven security automation to simplify cloud security configuration that is often complex and error-prone. We have some great community collaboration in this area, so stay tuned for further developments.

Streamlined Stacks developer experience

We've created an SDK that incorporates our learnings from deploying GitLab into multiple clouds to streamline the developer experience:

New crossplane-runtime: simplifies building robust controllers

New CLI tooling: init, build, publish, and install Stacks

New Developer Guide: to extend and build new Stacks

Together, these significantly reduce the time and effort to extend Crossplane with robust controllers to make new cloud providers, managed Kubernetes offerings, and managed cloud services available for use with kubectl.

And there's more!

There are a number of other features we'll mention just breifly here:

Enhanced resource classes: default classes, validation, annotation support

Streamlined Stacks install, RBAC configuration, and namespace isolation

New portable Wordpress App Stack to make it easier to get started

Beyond v0.3

We have many things on tap including:

Rook as a provider of claim-based provisioning for PostgreSQL,etc.

Code generation of new controllers built using the new crossplane-runtime

Additional secure connectivity strategies for GCP, AWS, and Azure

Stack versioning, upgrade, and enhanced dependency resolution

Support for installing Stacks from private repos

Additional Stack types beyond kubebuilder v2.0

Continous delivery pipeline examples for Jenkins, GitLab and GitOps

GitLab Auto DevOps integration with Crossplane

Moving beyond alpha to additional release channels

There are many different ways to get involved in the Crossplane project, both from the user side and the developer side. Please join us in helping the project continue to grow on its way beyond the v0.3 milestone as we move from alpha to beta over the coming months!

Join the open cloud movement to help level the playing field for everyone!