Crossplane graduates CNCF, ranking in top 10% of projects
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced that Crossplane has graduated, reflecting the project's maturity, widespread enterprise adoption, and growing contributor community. Crossplane serves as a framework for creating cloud-native control planes, providing organisations with a unified platform for managing cloud infrastructure and applications.
Project evolution
Crossplane was created by Upbound and introduced as an open-source project in 2018. It joined CNCF as a Sandbox project in 2020 and was later promoted to Incubating status in 2021. Over time, Crossplane has expanded its remit to address platform engineering requirements, enabling internal teams to define, manage, and reconcile their desired cloud environments using declarative APIs.
The project has now delivered more than 100 releases, including the recent Crossplane v2.0, which introduced architectural changes to better support application control planes and AI-driven operations. Additionally, the contributor base has also expanded significantly, now exceeding 3,000 individuals from more than 450 organisations across the cloud and software industries.
"Crossplane's graduation marks a major milestone for cloud native and multi cloud platform engineering. 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," said Chris Aniszczyk, Chief Technology Officer at CNCF.
Adoption and integrations
Crossplane provides platform teams with the ability to build custom control planes, applying the declarative management model pioneered by Kubernetes. This allows both users and automated agents to manage cloud resources using APIs, supporting predictable and policy-driven infrastructure management as organisations move towards more automated and AI-enhanced operations.
The ecosystem of compatible providers now spans hyperscale cloud platforms, databases, SaaS applications, and on-premises systems. Integrations exist with CNCF projects, including Kubernetes, Helm, Argo, Flux, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent, Prometheus, Backstage, and Dapr, providing teams with options for comprehensive infrastructure automation through a single API layer.
The list of organisations adopting Crossplane for internal platforms includes Nike, Autodesk, NASA Science Cloud, IBM, and Akamai, among thousands of other enterprises from varied sectors.
Krishnan Anantheswaran, Principal Site Reliability Engineer II at Elastic, stated that the approach gave Elastic's engineering teams the ability to scale faster and deliver an efficient system without compromising on performance.
"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," he said.
Several milestones underpinned the graduation process. The project completed external security audits, reinforced vendor-neutral governance, and transitioned its infrastructure to CNCF control, ensuring operational sustainability. Contributor diversity has increased substantially since the project's move to CNCF, with the number of individual contributors and authors of pull requests rising fivefold.
Key priorities for the next phase of Crossplane development include further hardening of core APIs, such as real-time compositions and managed resource activation policies, to improve reliability in diverse operating environments. There is also a focus on expanding metrics, health reporting, and observability to allow teams to gain deeper, real-time insights into the state and performance of managed control planes.
