Upbound, founded in 2018, has just announced that it has raised $60M in Series C funding. The main focus of this funding is to expand further the capabilities of Upbound’s open-source multi-cloud management project, Crossplane.

In this article, we will introduce Crossplane and how it works.

What is Crossplane?

Crossplane is an open-source multi-cloud management project developed by Upbound. It was created to make managing cloud-native technologies, such as containers and serverless computing, easier and more efficient across different cloud providers. Crossplane allows users to set and enforce desired states across their clouds, eliminating redundant setup and maintenance tasks. It can be installed on existing Kubernetes or stand-alone clusters with the same command.

Crossplane helps developers in multiple ways: it allows them to abstract cloud infrastructure from their applications so that the same application can run across multiple clouds; it simplifies the migration of applications and workloads from one cloud provider to another; and it efficiently utilizes resources across cloud providers. Additionally, Crossplane makes it easier for DevOps teams to manage multiple clouds by providing standard methods for provisioning, configuration, deployment, monitoring, testing, and logging of workloads in an automated fashion without having to manually manage each cloud provider separately.

Crossplane supports over twenty different public clouds and local development environments such as minikube or Docker container solutions. By using Crossplane, organizations can ensure uniform operation regardless of the underlying infrastructure provider, apply automated change management policies between multiple clouds; and reduce operational complexity when implementing new services across diverse infrastructure resources.

What is Upbound?

Upbound is an open source company that specializes in building software that helps users manage workloads and resources across clouds. Founded in 2018, Upbound is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

The company provides software development kits (SDKs), APIs and tools such as Crossplane to allow developers to create, deploy and manage multi-cloud applications with ease. Their goal is to make cloud infrastructure more efficient, secure and reliable.

Crossplane is Upbound’s flagship open source project which helps developers create and connect serverless applications across multiple cloud services from different vendors through a single interface. This can be beneficial for companies looking for cost efficiency or those adopting hybrid cloud strategies as well as for individual developers who need better control over their projects.

By using Crossplane, organizations can build the flexibility they need into the infrastructure of their applications without sacrificing security or performance.

Benefits of Crossplane

Crossplane is an open source multi-cloud management project that has revolutionized how organizations use and manage multi-cloud infrastructure. This project allows users to manage their cloud resources across multiple cloud providers in a unified way, thus providing an unprecedented level of flexibility for their cloud deployments.

Let’s now delve into the various benefits of using Crossplane for multi-cloud management.

Open source

Crossplane is an open source project, meaning its source code is freely available to the public and can be modified and improved upon by anyone. This provides many advantages, such as greater transparency into the underlying technology and the ability to easily customize its components in order to fit unique application and development needs.

Additionally, open source solutions benefit from a vibrant and engaged community of users who are sharing their insights, knowledge, bug fixes and other improvements. This ensures Crossplane will always be adapting to meet modern requirements in a way that enables users to save time and money on cloud management solutions.

Multi-cloud management

Crossplane, an open source multi-cloud management project, offers organizations a range of benefits when managing multiple cloud environments. Crossplane helps organizations bring together the underlying infrastructure and services of multiple cloud providers into a consistent experience. With Crossplane, you can select the best option for each service- and workload-specific needs based on pricing, performance, or other criteria. You can also keep workloads across different clouds in sync and migrate them as needed.

Crossplane alleviates cloud resource fragmentations caused by running workloads across multiple clouds from a single view—instead of managing resources individually from their respective cloud providers’ console. It also gives more flexibility to your IT teams who will have broader insight into usage trends and be able to adjust capacity requirements to address changing needs for backup storage, development labs, network security policies etc. In addition to these benefits, Crossplane also allows organizations to have decentralized governance controls across regions and offers more visibility into cross-cloud utilization trends.

Overall, Crossplane helps simplify the challenging task of managing multiple cloud environments as it provides a unified platform for developing applications that span public clouds that require full control over infrastructure configuration available anywhere in the world. By providing automation capabilities that coordinate multi-cloud workloads deployed on geographically diverse resources, Crossplane ensures high performance standards are consistently met while reducing costs associated with manual setup requirements.

Cost savings

Using Crossplane to manage multiple cloud resources has many benefits, particularly for organizations that are looking to save money. Crossplane’s cross-cloud adapter allows users to leverage different clouds in order to get the best prices on computing, storage, and networking services. It also features cost controls which allow teams to specify how much they’re willing to spend per resource. As a result, organizations can utilize cost optimization strategies without having to manually configure every new cloud resource.

By taking advantage of Crossplane’s cost savings benefits, organizations can reduce their overall IT costs and gain more efficient use of their cloud infrastructure budget. Crossplane helps teams create hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions by running workloads in multiple public clouds and using those solutions both into their own data center as well as other public clouds. This integration enables teams to consolidate costs further by being able to use the same applications across multiple clouds with uniformity in management control and configuration tweaks applied as needed along the way. Additionally, teams benefit from enhanced security across all clouds and centralization in terms of day-to-day operation making changes faster while creating greater efficiency all around.

Upbound’s Investment

Upbound, a cloud-native software development platform, recently announced a $60 million investment from investors to grow its open source Crossplane multi-cloud management project. This investment comes at a time when companies are looking to transition their cloud applications and workloads to a more cost-effective and secure environment.

Let’s look at why the investment was made and what it means for Upbound.

Amount of Investment

In its latest funding round, Upbound raised $60M in funding to accelerate its work on Crossplane, an open source multi-cloud management project. The round was led by LeadingEdgeVC and Battery Ventures, with participation from CRV and several others.

This brings Upbound’s total funding to date up to $100M. Upbound will use the investment to continue growing the Crossplane community and building out additional products powered by Crossplane. These products will help customers build, manage and secure their distributed applications across cloud providers. The new funds will also be used to help power a growing team of engineers, designers, product managers and sales staff across its various offices around the world.

The investment comes at a time when organizations are increasingly turning towards multi-cloud solutions for scalability and flexibility in the modern hybrid cloud world. Upbound’s Crossplane project helps unlock the potential of multiple cloud solutions while providing organizations with automated, comprehensive governance over their infrastructure deployments. With this new infusion of capital, Upbound looks to further cement itself as a leader in multi-cloud technology.

Investors

Upbound has announced a $60M investment to grow its open source Crossplane multi-cloud management project. Investors include General Catalyst, Lead Edge Capital, Amplify Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. They join existing investors Madron Dynamics and AppStar Capital. This brings the total raised by the company to date to $76 million.

The investment capital will be used to accelerate development of the open source project, expand access and usage of multi-cloud capabilities across global enterprises, and recruit additional talent for engineering, product development, go-to-market and customer success teams.

Crossplane is a unified control + automation hub for managing all kinds of Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds. It allows organizations to move their applications between clouds without any code changes or cloud platform dependencies; define clusters as code; reuse scalable resources to achieve elasticity; create workload on demand with global Clusters API without worrying the location of underlying drives — making building modern cloud native applications easy and fast.

Crossplane’s Features

Upbound’s open source Crossplane project aims to provide users with a simple and intuitive way to manage multiple cloud infrastructure across all major cloud service providers. Crossplane focuses on making multi-cloud management as easy as possible. It provides users with a range of features that make managing cloud infrastructure a breeze.

Let’s delve deeper into the features of Crossplane and see what makes it a great multi-cloud management tool.

Automation

With Crossplane, both DevOps teams and cloud administrators can use automation to rapidly deploy, configure and manage workloads across the entire stack, from infrastructure to applications and beyond. This helps simplify the multi-cloud management process while accelerating time to market.

Crossplane has many automated features that can be used to maximize productivity and cost efficiency. These include:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): By utilizing IaC within a multi-cloud environment, users can easily embed their business context into all cloud configurations and deployment models in order to achieve greater orchestration between resources.
• Continuous Delivery (CD): With Crossplane’s integrated continuous delivery pipelines, users can quickly create application deployments in order to automate the processes of code delivery and testing in multiple environments.
• Automated Load Balancing: Crossplane dynamically adjusts workloads for different cloud clusters or multiple cloud providers based on demand in order to maintain performance levels across the entire system.
• Automated Security & Monitoring: Crossplane’s integrated security capabilities can help secure an organization’s environment by using automated authentication protocols as well as monitoring services for application changes or server misconfigurations.

Orchestration

Crossplane provides powerful, built-in resource orchestration capabilities allowing users to declaratively define, configure and connect their software resources in the cloud. Crossplane also provides a powerful composer that gives users full control over their application architecture, enabling them to orchestrate multiple cloud providers as components of their application landscape. With Crossplane Orchestration, users can guarantee that their applications are configured correctly and available in the target cloud environment at scale.

Crossplane Orchestration is built on top of Kubernetes’ native Declarative Applications Specification (DAPs) format, which enables it to compose multiple cloud providers into a unified workflow. Through its composable architecture, Crossplane extends beyond just orchestrating services across clouds; it also simplifies multicloud deployments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Helm charts and Kustomize. This makes Crossplane a highly flexible platform for managing multiple clouds in an organized fashion — freeing up time for developers to focus on value-adding tasks versus administrative ones.

In addition its out of the box integration with Terraform & Kubespray support enables users to quickly create new multicloud environments for experimentation and testing purposes without having to manually configure clusters or services from scratch. All this makes Crossplane an ideal choice for IT Operations teams looking at streamlining multi-cloud applications management.

Security

Crossplane securely and reliably manages your multi-cloud infrastructure using an extensive feature set focused on managing multiple cloud providers and resources.

Crossplane’s security features provide a secure connection to cloud providers, authentication and authorization, role-based access control (RBAC) tools, encryption at rest, encryption in transit and fine grain authorization for every user. Additionally, Crossplane provides visibility of the cloud components including their configurations for auditing purposes as well as compliance enforcement capabilities.

Through its powerful abstraction layer, it provides access to securely managed resources across different clouds, keeping you safe from vendor lock-in problems. Finally, Crossplane enforces resource isolation ensuring that cloud resources are never shared between users or teams protecting you from data security issues.