Crossplane: A Game-Changer for Midmarket Companies

As businesses increasingly transition to cloud native technologies, the challenge of managing various cloud resources efficiently becomes paramount. Enter Crossplane, a rising star in the cloud native ecosystem. But what is it, and why should midmarket businesses, particularly in specific industries, sit up and take notice?

What is Crossplane?

Crossplane is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) project that allows teams to manage and provision infrastructure resources using Kubernetes. Crossplane extends the Kubernetes API, making it possible to define cloud resources and services right from the Kubernetes control plane. This unifies the application and infrastructure deployments under a single workflow.

Key components of Crossplane include:

1. Stacks: These are extendable units in Crossplane that encapsulate a set of cloud resources.
2. Resource Claims & Classes: Abstractions allow abstract resource claims without specifying a cloud-specific provider.
3. Workloads: These help in deploying applications alongside the infrastructure they depend on.

Benefits for Midmarket Companies

For mid-sized businesses, Crossplane offers several compelling advantages:

1. Unified Workflow: By integrating infrastructure provisioning into the Kubernetes control plane, Crossplane reduces the learning curve for teams. This means less time grappling with cloud-specific intricacies and more time focusing on developing and deploying applications.
2. Cost Efficiency: With a standardized infrastructure deployment, midmarket businesses can cut down on the operational costs tied to managing multiple cloud environments and tools.
3. Enhanced Flexibility: Crossplane allows for multi-cloud deployments, giving businesses the flexibility to choose, combine, or switch cloud providers as per their needs without getting locked into one.

Spotlight on Key Industries

Here's how Crossplane could impact specific sectors:

• E-commerce platforms can use Crossplane to quickly set up scalable cloud infrastructures, ensuring they handle peak traffic times like Black Friday without a hitch. Instead of manual configurations across multiple cloud platforms, they can deploy unified solutions, allowing their engineering teams to concentrate on refining the user experience and integrating revenue-generating features.
• Healthcare: With patient data increasingly being stored on the cloud, healthcare providers can utilize Crossplane to streamline their cloud resource management. This ensures compliance and security, allowing IT teams to prioritize developing telehealth solutions or integrating AI-driven diagnostic tools.
• Financial Services: FinTech startups and digital banks can leverage Crossplane to roll out new features faster, such as mobile banking apps or investment platforms. By standardizing the infrastructure deployment process, they can allocate more resources to enhance user interfaces, security, and other critical revenue-generating facets.

Conclusion

Crossplane represents a significant step forward in the cloud native journey, particularly for midmarket companies looking to streamline their operations and focus on core business goals. Whether you're in e-commerce, healthcare, or financial services, the promise is clear: less time on infrastructure management and more time on innovation and revenue-generating activities.

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Key Takeaways

• Crossplane extends Kubernetes to provision and manage cloud infrastructure (databases, VPCs, IAM roles, managed services) using the same GitOps workflows used to deploy applications.
• For midmarket companies, Crossplane eliminates the need for separate Terraform/Pulumi expertise by consolidating infrastructure provisioning into Kubernetes YAML and existing CI/CD pipelines.
• Platform teams use Crossplane Composite Resources to offer self-service infrastructure APIs to developers without exposing cloud provider complexity.

What Crossplane Solves for Midmarket Organizations

Midmarket companies running Kubernetes often manage application deployments through GitOps (ArgoCD or Flux) while managing cloud infrastructure separately through Terraform — two tools, two state management systems, two workflows, two sets of expertise to maintain. When an application deployment requires a new managed database or a queue, the Kubernetes and Terraform workflows must be coordinated manually.

Crossplane collapses this by making cloud infrastructure provisionable through Kubernetes manifests. An RDS database or an Azure Cache for Redis instance is a Custom Resource that a developer creates with kubectl apply. Crossplane's provider controllers reconcile these resources against the cloud API and reflect their status back into the cluster. The same ArgoCD pipeline that deploys the application can provision its dependencies — no separate Terraform runs, no cross-team coordination.

Composite Resources: The Self-Service Infrastructure API

Crossplane's most powerful feature for platform teams is Composite Resources (XRs). A platform team defines a CompositeResourceDefinition that abstracts away cloud-specific details. Developers request a 'PostgresDatabaseSmall' resource and get back an RDS instance with the platform-approved configuration: backup enabled, multi-AZ in production, encryption at rest, correct VPC placement.

Developers do not write RDS Terraform — they consume the platform's abstraction. The platform team controls the implementation. This separation of concerns scales to dozens of teams without creating a Terraform bottleneck. THNKBIG's DevOps consulting practice implements Crossplane environments for midmarket companies that want developer self-service without sacrificing operational control. Talk to us about Crossplane.