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by datahead 1034 days ago
Hi holoway, I've been following your project for a couple of months now. How do you compare yourselves to upbound/crossplane?

IME crossplane has been a "much better terraform" and also borrows from some of tf's open source provider code. Seems to be one of the best IaC pattern for k8s centric shops.

Pros: - adoption of k8s core engine, state mgmt

- model everything as a CRD, consistent definition pattern both infra and app

- open source

- great UI when layered with argoCD

- declarative

Cons:

- steep abstraction learning curve (for me anyway)

- docs lacked key context for newbs (also getting way better, big efforts here)

edit: formatting

2 comments

I think you hit the nail on the head with crossplane being a 'much better terraform' by design. Our goal isn't so much a better IaC / Declarative infrastructure tool - it's a better overall workflow for doing collaborative DevOps work. We think that by having an active model of your component, and tracking the resources along side, we can fix the feedback loops in a way that things like crossplane, terraform, or pulumi really can't.

Of course today it's early - so you have to look at what we're building as a foundation for the future. But it's a solid foundation to build on!

Wait, I thought k8s and open shift had this entire service catalog concept that was basically sort of a CRD->IaaS bridge.

Did that die? Is that not even what crossplane is? Once again, I'm 6 clicks deep and havent seen a single actionable example. I wish I could get inside some people's heads and wonder wtf theyre thinking when marketing this stuff.

Edit. Wow OSB and Service Catalog are dead. Is there a obituary?

> Once again, I'm 6 clicks deep and havent seen a single actionable example

Based on the terse reply to my question, it seems they really want you to create an account and go through their onboarding tutorial after agreeing to an absolute telephone book sized ToS. Hell, it's possible I'm violating one of the paragraphs by even talking about the process. I appreciate that's likely not what you had in mind, but it seems to be what they have in mind