Crossplane

If you’re running a multi-tenant managed Kubernetes platform, it’s ideal to give your service owners on the platform as much as possible automatically, with not extra effort on their part. Telemetry, monitors, alerting, and routine infrastructure resources shouldn’t require effort every time an application developer deploys a new service.

There is a wonderful CNCF open source project called Crossplane that helps to make this possible. As a platform engineering team, you can extend Kubernetes in a very helpful way to include infrastructure resource management. With this plug in, the platform owners can aggregate infrastructure from different vendors and then expose self-service APIs for application teams to consume, without having to write any code.

Crossplane provides a simplified interface for developers to request infrastructure resources via Kubernetes manifests called claims. These cloud resources can then be managed with the Kubernetes API using kubectl. Developers can claim cloud resources with just .yaml files, similar to other Kubernetes resource definitions.