At a time when kids his age were playing Little League baseball or collecting marbles, Bassam Tabbara (pictured) was already a developer. He got his first computer as a child and started his own company at 14.

“I started programming when I was nine,” said Tabbara, in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE Media. “I was immediately hooked on tech and entrepreneurship.”

Tabbara, founder and chief executive officer of Upbound Inc., has followed his early interest in technology for the better part of the past four decades. His journey has taken him from developing software for the largest software company in the world to the open-source community where he is now seeking to reshape how enterprises will manage cloud services in the future. Tabbara is on a quest to democratize the control plane.

“Our worldview is you will basically manage everything through the control plane,” Tabbara said. “People want a centralized point of control, and they do that around a control plane regardless of the workload. The best kept secret in cloud is the control plane.”

Birth of Azure Cloud

Tabbara’s interest in the cloud and control planes was formed early in his career. Following graduation from the University of Florida in 1995, he was immediately hired by Microsoft Corp. Over the course of 12 years in the research organization at Microsoft, Tabbara worked on a variety of projects involving early iterations of Windows and laid the groundwork for an initiative that ultimately became Azure Cloud. More than 20 patents were filed by Tabbara and his team at Microsoft in support of this work.

The mid-1990s was a time when the internet was beginning to gain traction, although most access was still through dial-up services. Microsoft wanted to offer a Web-based mail offering, so it purchased Hotmail in December of 1997 for between $400 and $500 million, the largest all-cash internet startup acquisition at the time.

Despite igniting what would become an era of free user email services, the Hotmail acquisition served another purpose for the software giant. Hotmail offered a testing ground for other company projects, including how to repurpose workloads for different servers.

“We were trying to figure out how to build massive data centers that could run at the scale of Hotmail,” Tabbara recalled. “That effort led to Microsoft’s entry into cloud computing.”

Cloud storage and open source

The next venture after Microsoft for Tabbara was Symform Inc. He and another Microsoft employee left in 2007 to found a company that would leverage a distributed computing model for global data storage without incurring high fees from cloud providers.

“The idea was how to build something that could store the world’s data efficiently without having to pay the cost of cloud computing,” Tabbara said. “Cloud storage at the time was really high, that was a very expensive bill every month. We scaled it to be one of the largest decentralized storage centers.”

The Symform experience resulted in a successful exit when the startup was acquired by Quantum Corp. in 2014 for an undisclosed amount. Tabbara became Quantum’s chief technology officer, but he was drawn to a new project that focused on open source and building a cloud-native alternative to infrastructure as code.

Tabbara’s new company, Upbound, was started in 2017. Its genesis came from an open-source project called Rook that used Kubernetes to automate the tasks of distributed storage systems. Tabbara was Rook’s maintainer, and the first release came in May 2019.

“Rook was using the control plane supporting Kubernetes,” Tabbara said. “I learned the power of open source and the first-mover advantage of creating a category and the power of control planes. Rook was the poster child of what we’re doing today with Crossplane.”

At the time of Rook’s initial release, the control plane tool had already reached 40 million container downloads and had been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Tabbara’s experience with Rook convinced him that the Kubernetes platform would pave the way for another key initiative to build cloud-native controls for managing cloud services using the same approach as the container tool. This became Crossplane.

Tabbara provided a glimpse into the Crossplane framework during his first interview with theCUBE in 2018.

“We’re essentially building a service that helps companies run across cloud environments,” said Tabbara, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen. “Kubernetes is an amazing service to build on top of, and we’ve learned that through our investment in Rook.”

Beyond containers

Although Kubernetes offers an ideal foundation for Rook and Crossplane, Tabbara’s approach diverges from others in the industry when it comes to a container-centric view of enterprise computing. From Tabbara’s perspective, Kubernetes’ true legacy will prove to be its ability to manage infrastructure and applications in a general way, not its prowess as a container orchestrator.

Kubernetes may have gotten its start with containers, but Tabbara believes the time has come to “uncontainerize” the tool and apply it for managing infrastructure everywhere.

“We don’t believe that it’s going to pan out that everything has to run in a Kubernetes container,” Tabbara said. “We’ve separated the control pane from the workload it is managing. You can still get the benefits of the control plane without having to containerize everything.”

This belief is positioning Crossplane as a viable alternative in the infrastructure-as-code market. Tabbara has called this “a step up from infrastructure as code,” with its declarative API and controllers to automate the provisioning of infrastructure. Nearly anything that can be API-accessed can be orchestrated by Crossplane.

It would be a mistake to characterize Tabbara’s work with control planes as merely an isolated niche of the cloud computing world. Crossplane provides yet another important indicator of a fundamental shift in enterprise IT in which platform building has become the next extension of cloud computing. This is a natural outgrowth of the rise of supercloud, which has been covered extensively in recent months by SiliconANGLE. As companies increasingly build successful businesses on top of cloud platforms, new tools will be necessary to drive this model. Much as Tabbara saw innovation emerge in the 1990s and early 2000s with data centers at scale and distributed storage, he is in position again to catch the next wave.

“We see it as the rise of platform engineering,” said Tabbara, in an interview with theCUBE in 2021. “There’s a lot happening around people building their own platforms that layer on top of cloud, which happens to be also multi-vendor and multicloud. These teams are essentially organizing to build what looks like an internal platform, and a key ingredient of this internal platform is a control plane. Almost every enterprise we talk to is modernizing their IT; they are already in cloud, but they are doing so many more things to accelerate the pace of innovation.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE