Upbound

My main use case with Upbound Crossplane  during the time I used it was creating Azure  resources such as Azure  containers and VMs from Kubernetes  clusters and AKS clusters in an automated, fully cloud-native way.

A specific example of how I used Upbound Crossplane  for this automation is that we wanted to create resources and used Tekton  to manage the automated process. In our POC, we used Argo CD to manage the Azure resources so that if anything happened on the AKS cluster or on the Kubernetes  resources, if someone deleted it, we could easily recreate the whole thing. That's how we managed it.

In my opinion, the best features Upbound Crossplane offers are that it runs on Kubernetes, which is the main thing. As our whole infrastructure and everything runs on Kubernetes and we manage everything with Kubernetes, it is the best option. Since we also use Argo CD to manage the cluster, we don't need to manage anything else with GitHub Actions  or Terraform ; we only need to manage Upbound Crossplane resources.

As I mentioned regarding managing everything through Kubernetes and integrating with Argo CD, it simplifies our workflows and reduces the need for other tools such as Terraform  or GitHub Actions . In our scenario and use case, we needed to manage it through our back-end services, which were on Kubernetes, so it was easier to manage the resources through Kubernetes. From our back-end application, we could call the Kubernetes API, and we just needed to call a GitHub  repo and add a file on the GitHub  repo, which was very useful to manage. That's why we wanted to use Upbound Crossplane instead of Terraform.

Upbound Crossplane impacts my organization positively because, from our perspective, we need to rely on fewer resources. As it manages through Kubernetes, it is easier to manage from a back-end application to do everything. For example, if we create any resources from a back-end application, we could actually manage and keep the information in a database, so it was less of a task.

The documentation needs to be updated regarding the needed improvements for Upbound Crossplane. There is very little documentation online, and there are no tutorials for Upbound Crossplane. We can find so many more tutorials on Terraform and other resources, but there are very few tutorials for this. Whenever a new developer or a new person comes to learn about the resources, it is very helpful if they have some video documentation. So, Upbound should work on that.

My advice to others looking into using Upbound Crossplane is that Upbound should actually work more on the documentation; it would be very easy to use if someone goes through the documentation. It may work, but Upbound should definitely work more on the documentation.

I worked with Upbound Crossplane for about six months.

In my experience, Upbound Crossplane is stable.

Upbound Crossplane's scalability is very good; it is very scalable as it is running on native Kubernetes, so it was very scalable from my perspective.

We didn't use customer support with Upbound Crossplane.

Before Upbound Crossplane, we used Terraform, but from the back-end perspective, it was very hard to manage or run Terraform from the back end.

There is a return on investment, as there are fewer employees needed, but I don't have any concrete metrics because it is managed from the management team, who have the metrics. If you need it, you can contact the company.

A specific outcome or metric I can share is that we reduced the headcount by two engineers. From the initial infrastructure creation, the automation we created allowed us to build any resources based on the back-end, so no additional DevOps engineer was needed.

Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, since it was open source, we didn't need any licensing fees, but it was a little difficult because there is very little documentation. Other than that, everything is acceptable.

Before choosing Upbound Crossplane, we evaluated Terraform, but it didn't align with our goal.

Overall, I don't have any additional thoughts about Upbound Crossplane; it was a really cool product. Regarding Upbound Crossplane's AI capabilities, I haven't worked on that, so I don't have knowledge about it. Concerning Upbound Crossplane's AI capabilities, I think its accuracy and reliability of output are the same; I don't know, as I didn't work with Upbound's AI capabilities, so I don't have anything to share about that. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Upbound Crossplane  is that I built a small internal developer platform for my previous company.

I created a composite resource definition in Upbound Crossplane  that described the whole technology stack that my company was installing at each deployment. Because that software was specifically tailored for each customer, and it was a set of microservices, automating this process was necessary since doing it manually was quite time-consuming. I provided an interface that developers could use to create new environments.

The best features Upbound Crossplane offers is that it makes sense from a design perspective compared to Terraform  or other tools. Because it's integrated in Kubernetes , which is ultimately where your software is going to run, it leverages the Kubernetes  control loop. This keeps everything in one place, and you only have to maintain one mental model without having to think about how to save the state of your environment somewhere else, as happens in Terraform .

Upbound Crossplane has impacted my organization positively by making it much easier for the operations team to deploy our environments and software without requiring them to know exactly what had to be done. It offered me the possibility of creating an abstraction that other people could use to make their job easier. The time required to complete an environment setup was reduced from about one or two weeks to forty to fifty minutes. Although I don't have a specific metric for errors, it was very often the case that some configuration was forgotten or something was done differently compared to the past, which would cause problems down the line. By coding the process in Upbound Crossplane through composition, errors were only possible if I made an error in the code.

One main problem I had with Upbound Crossplane was probably due to the still somewhat immature state of the product. There were many bugs throughout, and some were quite troublesome. I had a problem where I couldn't create some resources with the same name in different namespaces. They would be included in the finalizers of the objects in other namespaces. When I was trying to delete those, I essentially couldn't delete them because there was always some finalizer remaining. I raised an issue on GitHub , and this issue has remained unresolved for several months. This is only an example of multiple occurrences of such problems.

I have the feeling that vanilla Upbound Crossplane, the open-source version, is somewhat declining compared to the commercial offering. I would like to see the open-source project maintained more actively.

I have been using Upbound Crossplane for one year and a half.

Upbound Crossplane was not stable in my experience.

Scalability was also a problem with Upbound Crossplane.

I did not try the customer support for Upbound Crossplane.

I used Terraform before Upbound Crossplane. I switched because Upbound Crossplane also offered the possibility of creating my own custom resources.

Before choosing Upbound Crossplane, I evaluated Terraform and Ansible .

I would suggest using Upbound Crossplane for smaller projects within the company, but don't rely too much on it for larger-scale projects or projects that are mission-critical.

I really loved working with Upbound Crossplane, and I'm sure that over time it is going to improve and possibly become the standard one day because in my vision it is really much better than its competitors. However, it still needs more work.

My overall rating of Upbound Crossplane is eight out of ten.

My main use case for Upbound Crossplane  is for platform engineering and infrastructure automation, as I use Upbound Crossplane  to provision and manage cloud resources, such as databases, storage, clusters, and networking, through Kubernetes  APIs, enabling self-service infrastructure for development teams.

Currently, I use Upbound Crossplane primarily to see which clusters and nodes are operational and which are not.

The best features Upbound Crossplane offers are infrastructure as Kubernetes  APIs and self-service infrastructure. Developers can provision resources without cloud credentials, which is a significant advantage. Multi-cloud support is also a strong point, as I have seen that it is useful in managing AWS , Azure , and GCP  from a single control plane. GitOps integration is another valuable capability.

Apart from the organization, Upbound Crossplane has also positively impacted my personal projects. I am currently learning through personal projects that I have created.

I can share a specific example of how Upbound Crossplane has impacted my personal projects. I used Upbound Crossplane's multi-cloud support to learn and experiment with provisioning resources for both AWS  and GCP  using a Kubernetes-based approach. It helped me understand cloud-agnostic infrastructure management without having to learn separate provisioning workflows, and I use that knowledge for cloud automation in my personal projects.

Upbound Crossplane has good community support, and I can find a lot of material over the internet. However, one area of improvement is the learning curve, as Upbound Crossplane concepts such as providers, compositions, and claims can be difficult for beginners. Documentation and troubleshooting can sometimes be challenging. We could benefit from better examples of debugging, improved error messages, and a more intuitive UI to make adoption easier.

I rated it eight out of ten because it solves infrastructure automation and self-service provisioning very well while supporting multi-cloud environments. However, it is not a ten due to the steep learning curve and the complexity involved in debugging and setting up compositions.

I have been using Upbound Crossplane for one year now.

Upbound Crossplane is stable.

Upbound Crossplane's scalability is good, and it is scalable.

Regarding customer support, I have not tried it yet. I have not felt any difficulties, so I will see how this evolves in the future.

I have not previously used a different solution before Upbound Crossplane. This is my first time using such a solution. I am more focused on my personal projects, so I do not use Upbound Crossplane extensively in my organization. However, I use it to learn, and I believe it will be great in the upcoming years.

I have not evaluated other options before choosing Upbound Crossplane.

My advice to others looking into using Upbound Crossplane is that they should try it once, and then they will understand what I am referring to. It is a great solution. I would rate my overall experience with Upbound Crossplane as eight out of ten.