Upbound announced that Crossplane, the open-source control plane framework it created, has officially graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, marking the project's highest level of maturity and community trust. The milestone underscores Upbound's leadership in defining the next generation of intelligent, AI-native infrastructure that unifies applications, cloud resources, and automation.
SEATTLE, Nov. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Upbound, the company behind the open-source Crossplane project and a leader in AI-native infrastructure platforms, celebrated the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) announcement that Crossplane has officially graduated, the foundation's highest level of project maturity today.
The graduation marks a pivotal milestone for the cloud-native ecosystem and validates Upbound's founding vision: to empower enterprises with Intelligent Control Planes that unify applications, infrastructure, and AI operations.
Originally created and open-sourced by Upbound in 2018, Crossplane has become the de facto standard for building cloud-native control planes, enabling platform teams to provision, operate, and secure infrastructure declaratively across any environment. Since joining CNCF in 2020, the project has grown into one of the foundation's most active and diverse communities, with 3,000+ contributors from 450+ organizations and over 100 million downloads worldwide.
More than 60 organizations have publicly shared their use of Crossplane, including Apple, Nike, Autodesk, Grafana Labs, NASA Science Cloud, Elastic, Akamai, SAP, IBM, VMware Tanzu, and Nokia. These adopters represent industries ranging from finance and manufacturing to media, telecommunications, and research, underscoring the project's global reach and production readiness.
Crossplane is now trusted by thousands of organizations, including Fortune 10 to global 2000 enterprises, global banks, and hyperscalers, to power production control planes across industries.
"Graduation proves that declarative control has become the foundation of modern infrastructure. When we started Crossplane, the goal was to bring declarative control, the same model that made Kubernetes revolutionary, to everything companies operate," said Bassam Tabbara, Founder & CEO of Upbound, Creator of Crossplane, and member of the Crossplane Steering Committee. "That vision is now reality, powering control planes across industries. But this is only the beginning, the intelligent control plane is the next evolution, where policy, intent, and intelligence converge so infrastructure can understand, adapt, and operate itself."
"Crossplane's graduation highlights the growing enterprise demand for modern control plane architectures that abstract increasingly complex infrastructure provisioning for developers," said Matthew Flug, Research Manager, Cloud Application Deployment Platforms, IDC. "As organizations continue to modernize their application delivery strategies, while wading into the development of AI applications, open and extensible control planes are becoming pillars supporting how teams deploy and operate cloud-native and AI-driven workloads. Upbound's continued leadership in this space underscores how critical intelligent, policy-aware automation has become to the next generation of platform engineering."
From Open-Source Innovation to Intelligent Control
As enterprises accelerate adoption of AI and agentic automation, the infrastructure layer has emerged as the new bottleneck. Crossplane provides the architectural foundation for overcoming it, bridging declarative control with embedded intelligence so both humans and AI agents can provision, operate, and adapt infrastructure at machine speed.
Upbound has advanced that vision through its enterprise distribution, Upbound Crossplane (UXP) 2.0, the Intelligent Control Plane for AI-powered infrastructure. UXP 2.0 delivers:
- Control Plane Project Tooling – Design, deploy, and manage control planes with integrated SDLC workflows.
- Web UI for Crossplane – A visual console for health monitoring, debugging, and day-2 operations.
- Tested & Secure Official Packages – Providers and integrations maintained by Upbound and hardened for enterprise use.
- Hardened for Production – Fully verified, SLA-backed stability and security.
- AI-Enhanced Operations – Autonomous tuning, predictive optimization, and GPT/Claude-powered insights.
UXP 2.0 enables enterprises to build and operate intelligent platforms that adapt in real time, preventing drift, reducing costs, and ensuring continuous compliance across clouds and regions.
Trusted by the World's Largest Enterprises
Upbound's Intelligent Control Planes are used by leading global enterprises, including top-tier financial institutions and Fortune 50 companies, to standardize infrastructure and accelerate innovation. By unifying declarative control with embedded intelligence, these organizations are running platforms that are both secure and self-optimizing.
"Crossplane has been foundational in how we deliver infrastructure as a product at American Family Insurance. Running Upbound Crossplane with Upbound's enterprise support has given us the production-grade stability and expertise we need 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 primitives and APIs," said Mitch Davis, Senior Manager, Engineering, American Family Insurance.
"Enterprises are racing to harness AI, but traditional infrastructure can't keep up," said Sarah Strobhar, Chief Revenue Officer at Upbound. "With Crossplane's graduation and the growth of UXP 2.0, Upbound is enabling customers to run their platforms at AI speed, where intent becomes execution. The result is faster developer velocity, better security, and greater operational efficiency."
The Foundation of the Agentic AI Era
Crossplane's graduation signals a new phase for the cloud-native ecosystem: the rise of intelligent, agent-ready infrastructure. As AI evolves from assistance to autonomy, control planes, initially designed for humans, are becoming the operating fabric for both humans and agents.
Upbound continues to lead this transformation, combining open-source collaboration with enterprise-grade innovation to build infrastructure that runs itself.
About Upbound
Upbound is pioneering infrastructure platforms for the agentic AI era, serving Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers across more than 100 countries. The company empowers infrastructure and platform teams with intelligent control planes, based on Kubernetes and Crossplane, that provision, operate, and adapt so platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents. Upbound is the creator and primary maintainer of Crossplane, the popular open-source framework for building cloud-native control planes, with over 100 million downloads and adoption by more than 1,000 organizations in production worldwide. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Seattle, a Series B startup backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, Upbound has raised $69M to date. For more information, visitwww.upbound.io.
Media Contact
Annie Talvasto, Upbound, 1 (206) 880-0210, [email protected], https://www.upbound.io/
SOURCE Upbound
Share this article