Upbound Inc., the startup behind the popular open-source Crossplane project, today announced a new self-hosting feature for its flagship control plane technology, enabling users to deploy managed control planes in self-managed computing environments.

Upbound Spaces enables customers with rigorous compliance and data sovereignty requirements to benefit from the company’s Crossplane control plane technology.

The launch of Crossplane back in 2018 was a major step forward in the world of multicloud management. It provides a single declarative application programming interface that enables teams building Kubernetes-based applications to address cloud resources and infrastructure across multiple providers. Using Crossplane, engineers have a way to standardize and accelerate application and infrastructure deployment across their entire business.

Crossplane leverages cloud-native technologies to centralize control, including the Kubernetes container orchestration platform and infrastructure-as-code. Developers can expose workload abstractions atop of Kubernetes to facilitate simple cross-cloud migration.

Upbound founder and Chief Executive Bassam Tabbara made the case in a 2019 whitepaper that cloud computing needs an open-source control plane that’s not proprietary to a small set of cloud providers. Crossplane allows teams to assemble infrastructure from multiple cloud providers and expose higher-level self-service APIs for application teams to consume without needing to write lots of code. As a result, teams no longer need to rely on proprietary control planes provided by the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp.

Crossplane, named as an incubating project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2022, has made steady progress and attracted interest from some of the world’s biggest technology firms. In 2020, IBM Corp. announced an experimental version of Crossplane available on IBM Cloud, and Red Hat Inc. has also partnered with Crossplane for infrastructure provisioning.

Upbound said Spaces is a version of Crossplane that will appeal to businesses with specific, self-managed needs, such as air-gapped servers and their own cloud environments. It enables customers to run control planes where they want while adhering to their unique requirements around data security, regulatory compliance and operational control. Businesses can now deploy fully managed control planes in any cloud or on-premises environment and receive the same benefits as if they were using the standard Upbound managed service.

Millennium BCP Cloud Compute Lead Nuno Guedes said Upbound has helped Portugal’s largest private bank to modernize and standardize its workflows using control planes, helping to save on thousands of hours of engineering time annually. “Upbound Spaces enables us to reach new scale and service continuity targets while providing a tailored control plane experience to our internal customers,” he said.

Upbound Chief Product Officer Oren Teich stressed that control plane abstraction is the most superior way to manage cloud-native resources and build fast, effective internal development platforms. “Scripting-based approaches are inherently brittle, and engineers worry,” he said. “Upbound has unlocked a new level of opportunity for these technical teams to get the benefits of cloud-native control planes wherever they want, managed by us or in their own environments.”

Spaces is available on a consumption-based pricing model that scales according to the number of managed resources being actively reconciled across the user’s various control planes.

Image: Upbound