The control plane has landed
The era of control planes has started.
That’s what Upbound, the company behind the open source Crossplane project (now donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in full) thinks.
Why does Upbound think this?
Well, it’s proclamation comes in line with the launch of the first enterprise-grade distribution of Crossplane – known as Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP), a technology designed to help enterprises adopt a universal control plane.
What would universal control plane provide?
If we remember that a control plane is the part of a network that carries signaling traffic and is responsible for routing, system configuration and management… then a universal control plane is (if we follow the logic of cloud abstraction one louder) is a means of moving beyond infrastructure as code (IAC) to increase automation, reduce costs and enable developer self-service.
UXP is all of that (above), but with vendor-supported enterprise-grade support.
Existing Crossplane deployments can upgrade to UXP and connect to Upbound Cloud for management and real-time observability.
Upbound Registry
Upbound also points to the Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry products.
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. a
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 what it says is the increased automation and API-centric integration opportunities.
Platform teams arrive
Upbound Cloud offers a point of control for both platform (PLAT) teams and software application development (DEV) teams.
According to Upbound, platform teams can 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,” said the company, in a press statement.
UXP is available now via GitHub and numerous marketplaces, including AWS Marketplace and OperatorHub, with other marketplace listings coming soon.
