Crossplane
Control-plane infrastructure as code built on Kubernetes
Crossplane is profiled here as a DevOps tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Crossplane is an open-source project, started by Upbound and now governed under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, that turns a Kubernetes cluster into a control plane for cloud infrastructure. Platform teams define infrastructure as Kubernetes resources, and Crossplane provisions and continuously reconciles the real cloud resources to match. Compositions let a team package raw resources into higher-level self-service APIs, so developers request a database or cluster through Kubernetes without touching provider consoles. Provider packages install through the Kubernetes package manager, and the managed-resource model means infrastructure follows the same review and GitOps flow as application manifests.
Key Capabilities:
Infrastructure defined as Kubernetes custom resources and reconciled continuously
Providers that manage resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, and other services
Compositions that bundle resources into custom platform APIs
Self-service provisioning through standard Kubernetes tooling
Continuous drift correction that restores resources to their declared state
Policy and RBAC inherited from the Kubernetes control plane
Alternative tools
- Terraform
Declarative infrastructure as code across cloud providers
- Temporal
Durable execution for long-running, reliable workflows
- Prefect
Python-native orchestration for data and ML workflows
- OpenTelemetry
Vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics, and logs
- Prometheus
Open-source metrics monitoring and time-series database
- Grafana
Open-source dashboards and visualization for all your metrics