Crossplane

Crossplane is an open-source framework for building cloud-native control planes that extends Kubernetes to orchestrate and manage applications and infrastructure across any cloud provider or environment without needing to write code, allowing platform engineers to create custom APIs that enable self-service infrastructure provisioning with built-in policies and guardrails.

Establish a control plane for infrastructure and APIs.

Crossplane is a CNCF project that turns Kubernetes into a universal control plane for infrastructure and platform APIs: cloud resources (databases, buckets, networks), SaaS, and even other clusters are modeled as Kubernetes custom resources and reconciled by providers for AWS, Azure, GCP, and more. Platform teams define higher-level, opinionated abstractions using XRDs and Compositions, publish them as installable packages, and expose safe “claims” so app teams can self-serve PostgreSQLs, queues, or whole app platforms via the same Kubernetes API they already use. This enables GitOps-friendly, declarative, multi-cloud provisioning with fine-grained RBAC, drift detection, and the ability to build bespoke internal platforms without writing bespoke controllers.

License: Apache 2.0

Tags: Control Plane, Infrastructure, Platform, APIs

Properties: Kubernetes-native control plane (CRDs, controllers), multi-cloud and SaaS provisioning via Providers, Managed Resources, Composite Resource Definitions (XRDs), Compositions, Claims (XRCs), Composition Functions, declarative GitOps workflows, fine-grained RBAC and namespace isolation, drift detection and continuous reconciliation, secret propagation to workloads, health/status via Conditions, policy and validation via OpenAPI schemas, package manager (OCI) for providers and compositions, versioning and upgrades with rollback, observability (events, metrics, logs), pluggable provider ecosystem (including Terrajet), cross-resource references and dependency ordering, cross-namespace publishing and claim binding, works with Helm/Kustomize/Argo CD/Flux

Website: https://www.crossplane.io/


Last modified January 3, 2026: update footer (f4d53f858)