The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of Crossplane, recognizing its maturity, wide adoption, and strong community momentum, along with its importance in cloud native platform engineering.
Crossplane brings the universal contract of declarative APIs to cloud infrastructure, applications, and services. It turns infrastructure into programmable, policy-driven software, enabling both humans and intelligent agents to request and manage environments safely through APIs rather than scripts or tickets. As AI begins to drive the need for more operations, Crossplane's architecture offers the predictability and safety required for automation. Its declarative model allows intelligent agents to operate cloud environments by targeting outcomes instead of executing instructions, helping bridge human-operated and AI-operated infrastructure.
"Crossplane's graduation marks a major milestone for cloud native and multi cloud platform engineering," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. "Crossplane empowers teams to build secure, scalable internal platforms. As we move into the AI era, this type of automated platform engineering infrastructure is vital. Projects like Crossplane provide the necessary guardrails and composability needed to innovate. The CNCF is proud to support this innovative project."
Created by Upbound and open-sourced in 2018, Crossplane joined CNCF as a Sandbox project in 2020 before quickly evolving into the foundation for modern platform engineering and becoming an Incubating project in 2021. Crossplane enables platform teams to build control planes that apply the declarative control model pioneered by Kubernetes, defining and continuously reconciling the desired state to cloud infrastructure and applications.
Since joining CNCF, Crossplane has made significant progress in maturity and adoption. The project has delivered over 100 releases, including Crossplane v2.0, which introduced a refined architecture for full application control planes. Contributor diversity has quadrupled, with more than 3,000 contributors from 450+ organizations and over 1,000 pull request authors, a fivefold increase since incubation.
Crossplane's provider ecosystem spans the full cloud native stack and covers hyperscalers, databases, SaaS platforms, and on-prem systems. It also integrates with projects such as Kubernetes, Helm, Argo, Flux, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent, Prometheus, Backstage, Dapr, and more, giving platform teams a single, unified API for managing their infrastructure and services.
The community aims to make Crossplane even more robust, transparent, and production-ready for organizations of every scale as cloud infrastructure continues to evolve by focusing on deepening stability, usability, and operational insight. Upcoming efforts include maturing and hardening core APIs such as real-time compositions and managed resource activation policies to improve performance and reliability across diverse environments.
Key priorities for the next development phase also include expanding metrics, health reporting, and observability features, enabling platform teams to gain richer, real-time visibility into the state and performance of their control planes.
To officially graduate from incubating status, the Crossplane community completed third-party security audits, strengthened its vendor-neutral governance, and transitioned its release and artifact infrastructure to CNCF-operated systems to ensure long-term sustainability.
"Elastic Cloud Serverless is redefining Elasticsearch with a stateless, cloud-native architecture that scales seamlessly across all major cloud providers. Crossplane has been instrumental in this transformation - providing a unified, Kubernetes-native framework to provision and manage infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure with consistency and reliability. This approach has empowered our engineering teams to scale faster, operate more efficiently, and to deliver a truly serverless experience without compromising on performance or resilience," said Krishnan Anantheswaran, Principal Site Reliability Engineer II, Elastic.
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