Crossplane ranks #7 in Infrastructure as Code AI search.

Crossplane is an open-source, CNCF Graduated (October 2025) cloud-native control plane framework created by Upbound in 2018 and donated to the CNCF in 2020. Built on Kubernetes, it extends the Kubernetes API via Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to provision and continuously reconcile applications and infrastructure across any cloud provider or on-premises environment—without requiring teams to write custom controllers. Platform engineers use Crossplane to compose custom, declarative APIs (using Composite Resource Definitions and Compositions) that encapsulate governance policies, permissions, and cloud provider details, enabling application developers to self-service infrastructure safely. Crossplane v2.0 extended scope beyond infrastructure to full application control planes. Licensed under Apache 2.0 with 11,000+ GitHub stars and 3,000+ contributors from 450+ organizations, it is used in production by thousands of organizations including Nike, Autodesk, SAP, IBM, Grafana Labs, Elastic, and NASA.