Day Two Cloud 100: Get To Know Crossplane: An Infrastructure Control Plane For K8s

Today’s Day Two Cloud is an introduction to Crossplane. What is it? The official definition says Crossplane is “…an open source Kubernetes add-on that enables platform teams to assemble infrastructure from multiple vendors, and expose higher level self-service APIs for application teams to consume, without having to write any code.” In other words, Crossplane plugs into Kubernetes to serve as a control plane that can run across multiple private and public clouds. It allows infrastructure teams to compose infrastructure with all the required policies, permissions, and guardrails, while also providing APIs for developer self-service. Crossplane is a sandbox initiative in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), meaning it’s an experiment that, if it attracts enough love, attention, and support, can one day become a full CNCF project. Our guest and guide to Crossplane is Dan Mangum. Dan is a Senior Software Engineer at Upbound, as well as a Crossplane maintainer and a Kubernetes SIG Release Tech Lead. We discuss: * What Crossplane does and why it might be useful * LLVM as a metaphor to understand Crossplane * Wait, what is LLVM? * How Crossplane compares to something like Terraform * The benefits and tradeoffs of another layer of abstraction/complexity * Where and how to play with Crossplane * More Sponsor: CBT Nuggets CBT Nuggets is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills. If you want to make fully operational your networking, security, cloud, automation, or DevOps battle station visit cbtnuggets.com/cloud. Show Links: Crossplane.io The Crossplane Blog – Crossplane.io Danielmangum.com – Daniel Mangum’s blog @hasheddan – Daniel Mangum on Twitter Crossplane Videos – YouTube Is Crossplane the Infrastructure LLVM? – Danielmangum.com Crossplane Slack Daniel Mangum on LinkedIn Transcription: [00:00:01.250] – Ethan Sponsor CBT Nuggets is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills, if you want to make fully operational your networking cloud security automation or DevOps Battle Station, visit CBT nuggets dotcom cloud. That’s CBT nuggets. Dotcom cloud. [00:00:21.840] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud on today’s show, we’ve got Dan Mangum from Upbound talking to us about LLVM and Crossplane. And if you’ve never heard of either of those things, do not despair. Dear listener, we are going to get into both of those and especially into Crossplane and how it automates and creates a platform for different cloud providers. It sounds confusing. It can be a little confusing, but I think it’s also kind of awesome. What do you think, Ethan? [00:00:51.480] – Ethan Ned, I have so many things I’m thinking right now. So so this show,