Crossplane graduates within the CNCF

2025-11-06 · Publisher : CNCF · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

On 6 November 2025, the CNCF announces Crossplane's graduation: more than 3,000 contributors from 450 organizations, and a 2.0 release designed to build full application control planes.

### Background On 6 November 2025, the CNCF announces the graduation of **Crossplane**, the project that lets platform teams build control planes to drive infrastructure and applications with Kubernetes' declarative APIs. Created by Upbound and open-sourced in 2018, Crossplane joined the CNCF Sandbox in 2020 and incubation in 2021. ### Key facts - More than 3,000 contributors from over 450 organizations; the project ranks in the top 10% of CNCF projects for contributor engagement. - More than 100 releases, including Crossplane v2.0 (14 August 2025), which introduces a refined architecture for full application control planes. - More than 1,000 pull request authors, a fivefold increase since incubation. - Users cited: Nike, Autodesk, NASA Science Cloud, Elastic, SAP, IBM, Akamai and VMware Tanzu. - Crossplane continuously reconciles the desired state of cloud infrastructure (hyperscalers, databases, SaaS, on-premises) with the actual state. ### Why it matters Crossplane is one of the central tools of platform engineering: instead of one-off infrastructure scripts, teams expose internal APIs (a database, an environment) that Kubernetes keeps in compliance. For an IT services firm, graduation reassures on the longevity of this choice against Terraform or proprietary tools, without making it trivial: the learning curve and the design of internal APIs remain the real work. ### Takeaway Crossplane, a key building block of API-driven internal platforms, reaches the CNCF's top maturity level.

Tags : Plateforme engineering, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, Multi-cloud, Open Source