Upbound and Leaders from the Cloud-native Community Advance a New Approach to Application and Infrastructure Management with Crossplane

Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud Join Crossplane Project Implementing the Open Application Model (OAM)
Upbound Initiates Steps to Donate Crossplane to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Inaugural Crossplane Virtual Community Day Celebrates Significant Project Momentum

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Crossplane Community Day — Upbound, the company behind open source projects Rook and Crossplane, today announced Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft have joined the Crossplane project. Announcements were made from the inaugural Crossplane Community Day, attended by community members from across the ecosystem.

“We launched Crossplane over a year ago to bring the same control plane-centric approach pioneered by cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to the enterprise and open source community,” said Bassam Tabbara, Founder and CEO of Upbound. “Crossplane introduces a powerful open source control plane to enterprise platforms, enabling companies to standardize on application and infrastructure management; automate operations; effectively implement their security, governance, and cost policies; and publish an internal API that integrates with their development workflows and tools.”

Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft joined the Crossplane community, solidifying the project’s growing importance in the cloud-native ecosystem, as well as the need for a common, community-driven approach to managing applications and infrastructure. The Crossplane steering committee has initiated the process of donating the project to the CNCF to continue driving the project’s growth.

“We started the Open Application Model because we saw the need for a well-defined model that brings a team-centric and platform-agnostic approach to building complete, cloud-native applications,” said Sarah Novotny, Partner PM Manager at Microsoft. “We’re excited to combine OAM with Crossplane’s forward-thinking infrastructure management capabilities to continue driving innovation of the Kubernetes ecosystem forward.”

Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud have been collaborating with Upbound on bringing the Open Application Model (OAM) to the cloud native community. The latest version of Crossplane implements the new version of the OAM specification and is now the open source implementation for Kubernetes.

“Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft invested in the Open Application Model (OAM) because we believe that modern application platforms need to promote a standard and team-centric approach to building, running, and managing applications,” said Xiang Li, Senior Staff Engineer, Alibaba Cloud. “Collaborating with the OAM community, Crossplane brings this team-centric approach to the broader cloud-native ecosystem, and enables applications to run seamlessly on different infrastructure.”

Upbound also announced that Red Hat is working with the Crossplane community to enable powerful hybrid cloud application scenarios. Cloud-native applications can use Crossplane to easily provision and manage infrastructure and services from AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

“Red Hat has been working upstream with the Crossplane community to create an operator to allow cloud services to be abstracted and consumed within Red Hat OpenShift,” said Erin Boyd, senior principal software engineer, Red Hat. “We are looking forward to continuing that collaboration and demonstrating that functionality during the Crossplane Community Day.”

In response to strong Crossplane community momentum and demand, Upbound has launched a preview of their fully-managed service offering of Crossplane – Upbound Cloud. The preview is available today and is the first product offering built on top of the Crossplane project. Upbound is working with a number of customers towards an enterprise offering later in the year.

About Upbound

Upbound is the enterprise cloud computing company behind Upbound Cloud and the creators of the open source projects Crossplane and Rook. Upbound Cloud empowers companies to build, run, and manage internal cloud platforms using Crossplane.