Enabling developers to take ownership of the Platform Infrastructure

Enter Crossplane

This is your need:

I need an S3 bucket so my application can send data to it.

Simple, right? But here is the problem you are facing. Either you:

• Have to open a ticket to another team’s Jira board, wait until the S3 is in place, and iterate because something was missing.

• Have to open a Pull Request in a repo from another team, typically, the “Infrastructure team”.

• You name it…

👉🏼 You don’t have ownership of the infrastructure you need for the applications you own.

And this is a huge problem, because:

1. One, you depend on another team.

2. Two, that makes you slow when shipping your code to Production.

In today’s email, I bring you a Cloud Native technology that would return power to developers by allowing them to own their own infrastructure.

Enter Crossplane

This is my definition:

Crossplane is a Cloud Native technology that allows you to deploy Platform Infrastructure by leveraging the Kubernetes Custom Resource API.

Workflow of working with Crossplane

In short:

• You deploy a Custom Resource, a YAML file, in Kubernetes,

• And that will be translated into a piece of infrastructure, like an S3 bucket.

More in detail:

• Crossplane works on top of the Custom Resource API from Kubernetes. It’s an application living in Kubernetes.

• Crossplane defines a set of Custom Resource Definitions.

• You, as a developer, can deploy new Custom Resources, a new Crossplane Composition, to tell “hey, I want an S3 bucket with the name ‘ACME’”.

• And Crossplane will connect to the corresponding API (AWS S3 API in this example) to create the infrastructure indicated in the Custom Resource you deployed.

Developer-Driven with Platform Ownerhip

Now that you have an idea about what Crossplane is, let’s get back to the problems it solves.

1. Lack of autonomy for developers

👉 Problem:

Every time you need a database or a bucket, you must open a ticket with the platform team.

👉 With Crossplane:

1. The Platform Team publishes internal declarative APIs (for example, kind: PostgreSQLInstance, kind: CacheCluster, or kind: MessageQueue) with secure defaults.

2. You, as a developer, just create a YAML manifest with their parameters, in the same way as you would deploy a Deployment or a Service.

Crossplane translates that into an RDS in AWS, a CloudSQL in GCP, or whatever is defined in the Composition.

2. Inconsistency and risk in infrastructure

👉 Problem:

You and your peers define your own infrastructure differently, sometimes with insecure configurations.

👉 With Crossplane:

1. The Platform Team defines Compositions that enforce corporate standards, such as instance types, policies, regions, tags, etc.

2. You, as a developer, can only choose allowed parameters.

You can guarantee that you deploy a secure and standardized (within your company) infrastructure without sacrificing autonomy.

3. Artificial separation between “infrastructure” and “application”

👉 Problem:

The code (application) lives in Kubernetes, but the infrastructure (DBs, queues, etc.) is defined in Terraform or another external tool. This breaks the declarative model and complicates GitOps deployments.

👉 With Crossplane:

1. Everything lives in the same Kubernetes control plane.

2. Your application manifest can include both the Deployment and the PostgreSQL instance or Bucket it needs.

This results in you having infra and app versioned and deployed together under a unified declarative model.

✨ Summary

In today’s email, I just wanted to make a heads-up about Crossplane, a technology that solves a real and important problem that the majority of us suffer from every day: Not owning our infrastructure.

In the last months, I’ve been implementing Crossplane to solve the problem described.

I’ve already learned a few things, and I’ll be sharing them with you here in the next few weeks.

If you know some friends who might be interested in this email, forward it!

Stay tuned!

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Thanks for your support and feedback, I really appreciate it!

You’re the best! 🖖🏼

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