Upbound Introduces Spaces for Enhanced Cloud Control Plane Management

Sometimes, you need privacy for your developer platforms and cloud-native Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) thanks to stringent compliance and data sovereignty requirements. If that's your situation, and you don't want to burn your time building it yourself from various open-source programs, consider Upbound's new Spaces, a self-hosting approach to the open-source project Crossplane,

First, to get you up to speed, Crossplane is an open-source, multi-cloud control plane. It enables you to build your own cloud-native control plane. Specifically, it's a Kubernetes add-on. With it, you can extend a Kubernetes cluster to provision, manage, and orchestrate cloud infrastructure, services, and applications

Upbound created Crossplane in December 2018. In 2020, Crossplane became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project under the Apache 2.0 license.

Once deployed, Crossplane acts as a translation engine between Kubernetes and external resources. Thus, you can use Kubernetes and Crossplane to control both applications and infrastructures. Pretty cool, huh?

As for Spaces, Craig D. Wilhite, Upbound's project manager, explained, "Upbound Spaces allows teams to run their own Upbound managed control planes in any hyperscale cloud provider or data center where compliance or data sovereignty is a concern."

How? Because in the past, when you wanted to run Crossplane, you had to spin up an entire Kubernetes cluster per instance of Crossplane and manage its lifecycle. "Now, continued Wilhite, with Spaces, users can self-host many managed control planes in a single Kubernetes cluster running in their own environment.

So, companies with specific self-management requirements, ranging from air-gapped systems to their distinct cloud setups, can now leverage the enhanced scalability, declarative APIs, and Git integration offered by Upbound's managed control planes.

Specifically, Spaces delivers:

• “Run everywhere” control planes: With Upbound-managed and self-hosted options, managed control planes are more accessible to businesses with rigorous compliance and data sovereignty requirements. Spaces require no connectivity to Upbound, so platform teams have full control of their control plane environment’s data while still getting the ability to scale, automate, and improve efficiency.

• Decoupled control planes from Kubernetes clusters: Run multiple managed control planes in a Space and achieve superior utilization and bin-packing of your control plane hosting infrastructure. Spin up control planes in seconds without needing a new Kubernetes cluster for every control plane.

• Declarative API: Use the Kubernetes-style declarative API to create new managed control planes in a Space.

• Improved Git Integration: Available in alpha, teams define their APIs and use Git workflows to push changes to the control plane. Spaces will work with any Version Control Service, from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or other services that support Git auth.

These self-managed control planes enable engineers to standardize and expedite application and infrastructure deployments across enterprises. This is a win both for developers, cloud administrators, and businesses.

As Nuno Guedes, cloud compute lead, at Millennium bcp, explained, “As Portugal’s largest private bank, we invest in the best technologies to provide us with business value while enabling us to adhere to our compliance standards. Upbound helped us to modernize and standardize our workflow backed by control planes, leading our platform team to save thousands of hours yearly, reducing human error, and improving compliance and visibility."

That sounds like a win across the board to me. You can check in with Upboubd.to earn more and contact the company for a free trial and access.

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