Upbound

Upbound is a software company that develops cloud-native infrastructure automation tools and maintains the Crossplane open-source project, as well as offering enterprise-grade software for building and operating multi-cloud control planes. The company positions Crossplane as a Kubernetes-native way to manage infrastructure and services across multiple cloud environments from a single control plane.

Crossplane is designed to run within a Kubernetes cluster and allow declarative provisioning of cloud resources. It introduces Providers to connect to cloud accounts and services, and Managed Resources to represent cloud services (such as databases or compute instances). Through Compositions, users can create higher-level abstractions and custom APIs that simplify provider-specific resources. The project emphasizes Kubernetes-native APIs, GitOps workflows, and extensible architecture to support a variety of cloud providers and services.

Upbound Platform (the company’s commercial offering) provides an enterprise-grade hosted and managed control plane built on top of Crossplane. It aims to enable governance, policy enforcement, multi-tenant management, and scalable operations for organizations deploying across multiple clouds and clusters. The platform supports centralized management, security controls, and streamlined collaboration for platform teams, developers, and operators.

The Crossplane project is open source and licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Upbound collaborates with a community of contributors and cloud providers to maintain and extend the project, with providers available for major public clouds and other services. Together, Upbound and Crossplane offer a Kubernetes-native approach to multi-cloud infrastructure management, enabling declarative provisioning, policy-driven governance, and reusable infrastructural abstractions.