Crossplane Achieves Graduation Status from Cloud Native Computing Foundation

On November 6, 2025, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) celebrated the official graduation of Crossplane, a pivotal project that has matured to the level of having significant adoption and community engagement within the cloud native ecosystem. The graduation signifies not merely a milestone but also an invitation for more organizations to leverage Crossplane's capabilities in their cloud operations.

Key Highlights

Crossplane, which was created by Upbound and has been open-sourced since 2018, has transitioned from its origins in the CNCF Sandbox to a respected Incubating project in just a few years. Its recent graduation indicates notable community momentum and stakeholder engagement, with over 3,000 contributors from more than 450 organizations actively participating in its development. This impressive contributor participation places Crossplane in the top 10% of all CNCF projects.

The project has also rolled out more than 100 versions, including its latest Crossplane v2.0 release, which introduces an advanced architecture for building full application control planes. Furthermore, Crossplane enhances support for AI-driven operations, thereby setting a new standard for cloud infrastructure management.

Transformative Capabilities

At its core, Crossplane empowers organizations by transforming cloud infrastructure into programmable, policy-driven software. With Crossplane, both human operators and intelligent agents can manage cloud environments seamlessly through declarative APIs—removing the hurdles traditionally associated with scripts or service tickets. This declarative model enables intelligent operations that can effectively target desired outcomes, further ensuring operational safety as automation increasingly takes center stage in cloud management.

Chris Aniszczyk, the CTO of CNCF, highlighted the importance of this achievement in the realm of cloud operations: "Crossplane empowers teams to build secure, scalable internal platforms. In the AI era, having a robust automated platform infrastructure is essential for innovation. Projects like Crossplane provide the necessary frameworks to work within those boundaries."

Notable Milestones on the Path to Graduation

The journey of Crossplane is marked by significant achievements since its inception in 2018. Initially developed as a response to the growing complexity of cloud environments, it has evolved to enable platform teams to build control planes that successfully adopt the declarative control model introduced with Kubernetes. This adaptation allows users to continuously reconcile and maintain their desired states across diverse cloud infrastructures.

Since joining the CNCF, Crossplane has witnessed a remarkable evolution in both its maturity and broad adoption. The provider ecosystem has grown to encompass various cloud-native components, databases, SaaS platforms, and on-premise systems, integrating with popular tools such as Kubernetes and Helm to offer a unified API for managing services and infrastructure.

What Lies Ahead for Crossplane

The immediate future of Crossplane is focused on enhancing its stability, usability, and operational insights. The community's aim is to develop deeper integration of core functionalities, which are essential for enhancing performance across different environments. Upcoming improvements will include expanded metrics, health reporting, and observability features, providing platform teams with real-time visibility into their control plane's state and performance.

Transitioning to graduation also involved rigorous third-party security audits, bolstered governance, and a migration to CNCF-operated systems further ensuring ongoing sustainability.

User Testimonials

Industry leaders have praised Crossplane's transformative impact. For instance, Mitch Davis from American Family Insurance stated, "Crossplane has been foundational in how we deliver infrastructure as a product. It has enabled us to offer self-service access to developers without the complexities of cloud APIs."

Similarly, Krishnan Anantheswaran at Elastic noted, "Crossplane has provided a unified, Kubernetes-native framework that allows us to provision and manage infrastructure consistently across major cloud providers, enhancing our operational efficiency."

Crossplane's graduation is just the beginning of a new chapter in enabling intelligent, secure, and interoperable cloud operations. As cloud technologies continue to evolve, so too will the capabilities of Crossplane. For further information and to join the Crossplane community, visit Crossplane.io.