A typical user's journey with Crossplane starts with provisioning infrastructure using the Kubernetes API, then evolves to composing infrastructure into higher level abstractions, and culminates with building a complete platform using packages. Crossplane packages are distributed as OCI images, meaning that a platform API can easily be reproduced in any cluster, and they can declare dependencies, which specify the lower level services that support the higher level abstractions. This functionality allows for companies to distribute their product in an infrastructure provider-agnostic manner, and for infrastructure admins to build internal platforms made up of both generic and organization-specific components.

Daniel Mangum is a senior software engineer at Upbound where he is a maintainer of Crossplane, an open source CNCF project. He has held leadership positions in the Kubernetes community, and is an active participant in multiple other open source efforts. When not working in the Cloud Native space, Daniel spends his time writing, speaking, and building tooling for the RISC-V ISA.

This talk will be useful for folks building an internal infrastructure platform, as well as folks that build a product that depends on some form of infrastructure (databases, caches, blob storage, etc.). We will cover how to both build and consume packages, paving the way for advanced usage of Crossplane.