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Crossplane

Cloud infrastructure as Kubernetes resources — provision AWS, GCP, Azure with kubectl.

0Open Source
Platform Orchestration
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Overview

Crossplane is a CNCF open-source Kubernetes add-on that extends the Kubernetes API to provision and manage cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) using the same kubectl and GitOps workflows used for applications.

Key Features

  • Managed Resources for direct mapping of cloud resources to Kubernetes objects
  • Composite Resources (XR) for building opinionated platform APIs over cloud primitives
  • Compositions for assembling multiple cloud resources into a single abstraction
  • Provider ecosystem for AWS, GCP, Azure, Helm, Terraform, and more
  • GitOps-native: all infrastructure state stored as Kubernetes manifests in Git
  • CNCF Graduated project with active governance

Real-World Workflows

Build a self-service database-as-a-service

  1. 1Install the Crossplane AWS provider and configure credentials
  2. 2Define a CompositeResourceDefinition (XRD) for 'PostgresInstance'
  3. 3Write a Composition that maps 'PostgresInstance' to RDS + security group + subnet
  4. 4Developers claim a database with a simple YAML — no AWS console access needed

Manage multi-cloud infrastructure with GitOps

  1. 1Store all Crossplane Compositions and Claims in a Git repository
  2. 2Sync to Kubernetes clusters via ArgoCD or Flux
  3. 3Any cloud resource change goes through a PR review and CI pipeline
  4. 4Drift detection catches out-of-band changes automatically

Getting Started

# Install Crossplane via Helm
helm repo add crossplane-stable https://charts.crossplane.io/stable
helm install crossplane crossplane-stable/crossplane \
  --namespace crossplane-system --create-namespace

# Install an AWS provider
kubectl apply -f provider-aws.yaml

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