Crossplane Is the Cloud-Native Framework for Platform Engineering 
Create platforms like cloud providers:
Build your own APIs and services with control planes
Extend Kubernetes to manage any resource anywhere
Use a library of components to assemble your platform faster
Expose declarative APIs that humans, automation, and AI systems can safely act on
See how it works
Learn what problems Crossplane solves and see it in action.
Created to power your platform
Upbound built Crossplane to help organizations build their platforms like the cloud vendors build theirs—with control planes. Crossplane is an open source, CNCF project built on the foundation of Kubernetes to orchestrate anything. Encapsulate policies, permissions, and other guardrails behind a custom API layer to enable consumers, whether human users, automated workflows, or AI agents, to self-service without needing to become an infrastructure expert.
Extensible by design
Crossplane is designed from the ground up with extension in mind. From Providers that extend Crossplane to orchestrate new kinds of applications and infrastructure, to Configurations that extend Crossplane to expose new APIs, our community will help you find what you need to build your ideal controlplane. This extensibility makes Crossplane easy to integrate with higher-level automation and tooling, including AI-assisted workflows. Interested in building your own extensions?
Join the Crossplane Slack ChannelPutting you in control
Most platforms require that you buy into their opinionated API concepts. With Crossplane you can build a platform around your own opinions using declarative APIs that make intent explicit, auditable, and and machine-readable—prerequisites for operating platforms at scale. We know the best control planes are tailored to the task at hand, so we designed Crossplane as a framework that puts you in control. Use Crossplane to design a control plane that exposes declarative APIs tailored to your unique orchestration needs.
Learn MoreBuilt on a solid foundation
Crossplane builds on the class leading Kubernetes control plane, extending its battle hardened reliability and security features like Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to orchestrate everything - not just containers. By extending Kubernetes’ control model beyond containers, Crossplane enables a unified control layer for infrastructure. Because it shares a foundation with Kubernetes, Crossplane also integrates smoothly with the broader cloud-native ecosystem, allowing platforms to build automation and higher-level tooling without reinventing infrastructure fundamentals.
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Crossplane is open source and community driven
Crossplane is an open source control plane framework supported by the cloud-native community. Crossplane has been endorsed by some of the world's best companies and is released under the Apache 2.0 license. We remain committed to our community and will always be vendor neutral.
We are a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.
© Crossplane Authors 2026. Documentation distributed under CC-BY-4.0.
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