As the IT infrastructure spams to multiple clouds, on-premises and at the edge, and it gets more complex, businesses are looking for a way to manage it all. That is how cross-cloud management control planes are becoming an enterprise priority, according to Bassam Tabbara (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Upbound Inc.

The Crossplane cloud control plane promises to allow organizations to manage any infrastructure or cloud services directly from Kubernetes. It is an open-source Kubernetes add-on for platform teams to assemble infrastructure from multiple vendors and expose higher level self-service APIs for application teams to consume, without having to write any code. It also provides a single-entry point for user interaction where policy can be enforced, guardrails applied, and auditing conducted.

“Crossplane enables you to extend the control plane of Kubernetes to manage everything that’s offered by Amazon and Microsoft and Google and VMware and OpenShift and Red Hat; everything else … falls into the same orchestrator or the same control plane that’s manaing it all,” Tabbara said. “And you can access it and give it to your developers in a safe way using GitOps-like approaches.”

Tabbara spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. They discussed the growing business need for a cross-cloud management control plane, Crossplane’s gain in popularity, and how the Crosplane community is responding with new features, integration and support. (* Disclosure below.)

Applying the GitOps approach

Crossplane provides the ability to provision and manage cloud infrastructure, services and applications using GitOps or any tool that works with the Kubernetes API. GitOps is an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development, such as version control, collaboration, compliance and CI/CD tooling, and applies them to infrastructure automation.

GitOps has gained momentum by letting teams manage infrastructure through configuration that is stored in GitOps repositories, but it is the connection to a control plane that makes that happen.

“So what Crossplane does is let you extend the GitOps approach and the management approach that’s pioneered by the Kubernetes community to the entire surface area of cloud. So not only can you deploy your containers using GitOps, you can actually manage through GitOps VMs, serverless databases in cloud, hybrid environments, multicloud environments, even your load balancers that are on-premise,” Tabbara explained.

This is where Crossplane is capturing the most success.

“We’re seeing a lot of people that are adopting these approaches to managing infrastructure while they’re building their platforms,” he said. “We’re seeing massive end-user adoption of Crossplane right now; it’s overwhelming.”

Vendors and end users are increasingly engaged

Engaging the entire ecosystem has been critical to Crossplane’s growth. As it is a control plan that addresses the infrastructure offered by different vendors, it needs to have the involvement of all of them. On the other hand, growing end-user adoption is what encourages suppliers to participate.

“It’s a two-sided network; both the ecosystem adoption and the end-user adoption are important for Crossplane. And we’re seeing massive traction in both right now,” Tabbara stated.

This involvement has also been fundamental to the development of new Crossplane features and innovation. Companies often start getting involved with open source just by asking questions, reporting issues and requesting features. But within a few months, it is possible to see real and significant contributions, according to Tabbara, so much so that most contributors to Crossplane are now outside Upbound, which created the platform.

A key feature of Crossplane’s growth is self-service. Rather than understanding all the details of security, networking, etc., developers prefer to focus on what matters, according to Tabbara.

“If you give them an API just like Kubernetes does that tells them: ‘OK, look if you want a pod or if you want a database or if you want a cache, here’s the API you use; use whatever framework you want, use any language you want, and then we’ve got all the guardrails built in behind the API line … and then the control plane takes care of the rest.’ That is the path we’re on as an industry,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. (* Disclosure: Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE