With the release of open-source multi-cloud management interface Crossplane, cloud services developer Upbound wants to provide an open and consistent way to handle integrations with whichever cloud platforms you throw at it.
“Crossplane presents a declarative management style API that covers a wide range of portable abstractions including databases, message queues, buckets, data pipelines, serverless, clusters, and many more coming,” Upbound CEO Bassam Tabbara wrote in a blog post. “It’s based on the declarative resource model of the popular Kubernetes project, and applies many of the lessons learned in container orchestration to multicloud workload and resource orchestration.”
Application portability between different cloud services has been hard to achieve, according to the company, but Crossplane aims to accomplishe it with a set of open-source abstractions of managed and cloud services, a universal cloud computing API, a workload scheduler and a set of smart automation tools.
With this portability, Tabbara explained Upbound is aiming to help users prevent vendor lock-in. “With an open control plane anyone can add new APIs and controllers and extend it to manage commercial or open-source cloud services and resources. It acts as a common integration point across services, and a basis for more open ecosystem of applications and tools.”
Though there are existing tools that serve a similar function, Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, who’s platform will be the first complex application to be deployed using Crossplane, wrote in a blog post, but there are some significant benefits to using Upbounds new interface.
“For example, Terraform and AWS Service Operator are similar infrastructure provisioning tools, but they do not support workload portability across cloud providers,” Sijbrandij wrote. “Terraform can dynamically provision infrastructure and typically performs changes only when the tool is run by a human, and AWS Service Operator can only provision managed services in AWS. As a result of an open API approach, Crossplane has an opportunity to change the cloud industry as we know it, and we’re excited that they’ve chosen GitLab to be the first complex app deployed with them.”
