Upbound #
Claim: Universal cloud APIs and consoles for your team
Focus: Upbound offers a UI layer to manage several Crossplane modules. Upbound itself deals only with infrastructure orchestration. The dynamic composition of configurations or automated workflows are not covered by the product. Upbound only works for developers who want to unify everything against Crossplane, a task that usually isn’t feasible if you have for example already existing IaC modules in place. Some developers may find the system redundant if they’re building a platform and have to build a more overarching UI layer.
Website: upbound.io
Docs: cloud.upbound.io/docs/
Details #
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Does it require developers to have DevOps knowledge? | YAML, medium |
| Self-hosted: | Enterprise version |
| Orchestrator | Kubernetes |
| Integration Concept | YAML, API |
| Setup time first app | 10 hours |
| Source | closed |
| Use Case | |
| Total Cost of Ownership | We weren’t able to get the information. You have it? Tell us! |
| Adoption | Early |
What is Upbound.io?
Upbound is primarily known as the mother company of the open source project Crossplane. The company’s overall goal is to usher in a new era of infrastructure management. In a perfect world (according to Upbound), infrastructure management would be automated, reliable, efficient, empowering, and ultimately lead to technological progress.
These are lofty goals, but Upbound offers multiple products to help developers deploy control plane architectures to production and manage them at scale. The brand promises to provide developers with everything they need to take complete advantage of Kubernetes.
What Is the Mission and Vision of Upbound?
Upbound describes themselves as the intersection between dev tools and cloud ops. Their mission of enabling innovation starts at this intersection, as the brand believes bringing the two together on one platform helps teams be more productive. Additionally, Upbound further facilitates this productivity by promising a simplified infrastructure and services that come with a user-friendly control plane approach.
Upbound keeps open source as the core of their product and culture. Their website states that they value the “open source community, innovation, and commitment to delivering quality results that run in production.”
The Upbound team is remote-only so that the company can pull talent from all over the world. For Upbound, it’s about having the best people working to solve complex problems.
A Brief History of Upbound
Upbound was founded in 2019 by the creators of Crossplane. The team is led by the founder and CEO, Bassam Tabbara.
At the beginning of November 2021, Upbound introduced Upbound Enterprise, expanding its offering to three product tiers, giving customers more options regarding hosting and management.
Core Features of Upbound
Crossplane follows the approach of managing any infrastructure resource through the Kubernetes API, thus reducing the overall amount of script types a team has to master.
Upbound’s three packages include Upbound Free, Upbound Business, and Upbound Enterprise. (Four if you count Open Source Crossplane.) The primary difference between the packages lies in how many users have access to a control plane and registry listings.
The Free tier is built for individuals and members of the open source Crossplane community. The free version comes stacked with a personal account, public registry listings, one private registry listing, one Control Plane, and Upbound CLI access.
The Business tier, which is created to give SaaS product-driven teams unlimited functionality, builds on the free version by providing users with organizations, terms and users, robot accounts for CI/CD, unlimited private registry listings, self-hosted control planes, around-the-clock customer support, and implementation services. Their newest tier, Upbound Enterprise, offers large organizations fully self-hosted deployment and a private self-hosted registry.
The Universal Cloud Platform enables users to debug configurations, offers centralized management, cloud tracking, and scalability across multiple clouds and datacenters. Additionally, it allows developers to bring in their own Crossplane and lets teams choose how to host their Crossplane.
Upbound’s Universal Crossplane (UXP) requires Kubeconfig for installing on clusters. UXP also assists teams in monitoring the health of their Control Plane through 24/7 support and the platform is maintained by the Upbound team.
And last but not least, Upbound Registry is intended as a tool that enables developers to create their own API blueprint. Through Registry, developers can create private listings or choose to share their work with the Crossplane community.