The enterprise world has seen entire businesses, such as Snowflake, Databricks and Confluent built on the cloud platform. These are essentially platforms built on platforms, and one company is pursuing an answer to a simple question: Why can’t every company do this as well?

“We’re trying to help people build their own platforms,” said Bassam Tabbara (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Upbound Inc. “Our realization was if the enterprises are platforming and re-platforming, why shouldn’t they build their platform in the same way that the cloud vendors build theirs?”

Tabbara spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Keith Townsend and Paul Gillin at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the core technology behind Upbound’s approach and the impact of a multi-vendor world. (* Disclosure below.)

Using the Kubernetes control plane

At the core of Upbound’s approach is Crossplane, an open-source framework developed by the company for building cloud-native control planes. Crossplane is an extension of the Kubernetes control plane, and it was advanced to the incubation level by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in September.

“With Crossplane, we took the control plane of Kubernetes and then built bindings providers that connected to AWS, to Google, to Azure, to DigitalOcean,” Tabbara explained. “You can now manage cloud services using the same approach that you are using with Kubernetes and use the entire ecosystem of tooling around it.”

Although Upbound’s Crossplane leverages Kubernetes for its solution, Tabbara cautions against a view of the world as being container-centric. Multicloud is in fact multi-vendor because of the set of services on which today’s enterprises depend.

“The world is not going to look like containers on the bottom and everything else on top,” Tabbara said. “Instead what we are going to see is a set of services that people are using across different vendors. You could be an AWS shop primarily, but I bet you are using Confluent or Elastic or Databricks or Snowflake or Mongo. How do I bring them together in a meaningful way so that I can build my platform on top of the collection of them and offer something that my developers can consume and self-service on?”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event. Neither Upbound Inc., the sponsor for this segment, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE