Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Graduation of Crossplane

Graduation marks Crossplane's readiness for widespread use and its evolution from a control plane framework to groundwork for intelligent, secure, and scalable cloud operations and platform engineering

Key Highlights:

• Crossplane has officially graduated within the CNCF project ecosystem, recognizing its maturity, wide adoption, and strong community, along with its importance in platform engineering.
• With over 3,000 contributors from more than 450 organizations, Crossplane ranks in the top 10% of all CNCF projects for contributor engagement and authorship.
• Crossplane has delivered over 100 releases, including the recent Crossplane v2.0, which introduces a more refined architecture for building full application control planes and enhances support for AI-driven operations.
• Crossplane is now a graduated CNCF project and is available for production use today.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the graduation of Crossplane, recognizing its maturity, wide adoption, and strong community momentum, along with its importance in cloud native platform engineering.

Crossplane brings the universal contract of declarative APIs to cloud infrastructure, applications, and services. It turns infrastructure into programmable, policy-driven software, enabling both humans and intelligent agents to request and manage environments safely through APIs rather than scripts or tickets. As AI begins to drive the need for more operations, Crossplane's architecture offers the predictability and safety required for automation. Its declarative model allows intelligent agents to operate cloud environments by targeting outcomes instead of executing instructions, helping bridge human-operated and AI-operated infrastructure.

"Crossplane's graduation marks a major milestone for cloud native and multi cloud platform engineering," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. "Crossplane empowers teams to build secure, scalable internal platforms. As we move into the AI era, this type of automated platform engineering infrastructure is vital. Projects like Crossplane provide the necessary guardrails and composability needed to innovate. The CNCF is proud to support this innovative project."

Milestones Driving Graduation

Created by Upbound and open-sourced in 2018, Crossplane joined CNCF as a Sandbox project in 2020 before quickly evolving into the foundation for modern platform engineering and becoming an Incubating project in 2021. Crossplane enables platform teams to build control planes that apply the declarative control model pioneered by Kubernetes, defining and continuously reconciling the desired state to cloud infrastructure and applications.

Since joining CNCF, Crossplane has made significant progress in maturity and adoption. The project has delivered over 100 releases, including Crossplane v2.0, which introduced a refined architecture for full application control planes. Contributor diversity has quadrupled, with more than 3,000 contributors from 450+ organizations and over 1,000 pull request authors, a fivefold increase since incubation.

Crossplane's provider ecosystem spans the full cloud native stack and covers hyperscalers, databases, SaaS platforms, and on-prem systems. It also integrates with projects such as Kubernetes, Helm, Argo, Flux, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent, Prometheus, Backstage, Dapr, and more, giving platform teams a single, unified API for managing their infrastructure and services.

Thousands of organizations across industries—including Nike, Autodesk, NASA Science Cloud, Elastic, SAP, IBM, Akamai, and VMware Tanzu—use Crossplane as the foundation of their internal platforms.

What's Next for Crossplane

The community aims to make Crossplane even more robust, transparent, and production-ready for organizations of every scale as cloud infrastructure continues to evolve by focusing on deepening stability, usability, and operational insight. Upcoming efforts include maturing and hardening core APIs such as real-time compositions and managed resource activation policies to improve performance and reliability across diverse environments.

Key priorities for the next development phase also include expanding metrics, health reporting, and observability features, enabling platform teams to gain richer, real-time visibility into the state and performance of their control planes.

To officially graduate from incubating status, the Crossplane community completed third-party security audits, strengthened its vendor-neutral governance, and transitioned its release and artifact infrastructure to CNCF-operated systems to ensure long-term sustainability.

Supporting quotes:

"It's been amazing to see the project and community grow over the five years that we've been part of the CNCF. With Crossplane v2, we've delivered on years of community feedback and made control plane development accessible to every platform team. I'm incredibly proud of what the community has achieved and can't wait to celebrate graduation at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2025 in Atlanta."

—Jared Watts, founder of Crossplane, core maintainer and Crossplane Steering Committee member

"Crossplane began with a simple idea: bring the declarative control model pioneered by Kubernetes for container workloads to broader cloud and infrastructure. Seeing that vision become reality through such a diverse and vibrant community has been extraordinary. Graduation marks not an end, but a new beginning for building intelligent, secure, and interoperable control planes that define the next era of cloud and AI infrastructure."

—Bassam Tabbara, founder of Crossplane, alumni maintainer, and Steering Committee member

Project End Users

"Crossplane has been foundational in how we deliver infrastructure as a product at American Family Insurance. It's allowed our platform team to abstract away cloud complexity and offer developers self-service access to secure, opinionated environments across AWS and GCP. The result is faster delivery, consistent governance, and more time for teams to focus on customer value rather than cloud APIs."

—Mitch Davis, senior manager, engineering at American Family Insurance

"Elastic Cloud Serverless is redefining Elasticsearch with a stateless, cloud-native architecture that scales seamlessly across all major cloud providers. Crossplane has been instrumental in this transformation - providing a unified, Kubernetes-native framework to provision and manage infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure with consistency and reliability. This approach has empowered our engineering teams to scale faster, operate more efficiently, and to deliver a truly serverless experience without compromising on performance or resilience."

—Krishnan Anantheswaran, Principal Site Reliability Engineer II, Elastic

Learn more about Crossplane and join the community: https://www.crossplane.io/

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
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The Linux Foundation
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SOURCE CNCF