Guest: Bassam Tabbara (LinkedIn)
Company: Upbound (Twitter)

While Kubernetes started out as a container orchestrator, it has since been extended to manage everything in the cloud. However, this has come with a number of challenges, such as complexity. To tackle this, Crossplane was created to make it simpler to manage infrastructure and consolidate everything into a single control plane.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Bassam Tabbara, Founder and CEO at Upbound, to discuss Crossplane and what the project is about. He talks about the company behind Crossplane, Upbound, and its key focuses. Tabbara sheds some light on some of the cultural and organizational changes they are seeing with their customers and shares his insights on the evolution of DevOps.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Crossplane is a CNCF project that was donated in May 2020 by Upbound, which helps you build cloud-native control planes, which are compatible with the entire ecosystem since it is based on the Kubernetes API. Tabbara goes into detail about the project and how Upbound helps platform engineers build their own internal platforms.
• Kubernetes started as a container orchestrator, emerging as the standard for containers and running containers. However, in the last five years, it has evolved to manage everything in the cloud. Tabbara explains how Crossplane is helping by extending Kubernetes capabilities and adding new APIs and controllers to manage infrastructure.
• Upbound’s first few years have been spent creating Crossplane, the community, and the ecosystem around it. The last two they have been focusing on commercializing. Tabbara talks about how the company has grown due to the success they are seeing with people taking Crossplane into production.
• Upbound has been keen to expand its leadership team and was pleased to welcome Tom Anthony to lead the marketing efforts and Oren Teich whose key focus is the outbound product around Crossplane.
• Tabbara does not believe that DevOps is dead but he tells us that they are seeing a clear pattern with their customers where organizationally the enterprises are forming centralized teams. The key roles for these centralized teams are to own the credentials to the cloud and the bill, as well as, to focus on developer experience.
• DevOps teams are still focusing on operations and scale, as well as, cost and cloud. However, Tabbara feels that these teams are increasingly building internal platforms, but they are treating them more like a product, not a tool. He explains how Crossplane is being used as a structural piece within their platform.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.