 This is your host, Swapnil Bhartya. And today we have with us once again, Basam Tabara, the founder of UpBound, a Seattle-based startup in the cloud computing space, and also a creator and active maintainer of two very known open source project, Rook and Crossplane. And today we are going to talk about Crossplane, which has been promoted from CNCF Sandbox to incubation. Basam, first of all, it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks, Swapnil. Always a pleasure to be here. What problem is Crossplane solving? How it's helping teams to better manage their infrastructure resources? Definitely. So Crossplane is a universal control plane. So if you're not familiar with what control planes do, these are a control plane actually is the piece that is able to serve and deploy and manage infrastructure, as well as connected up to applications. If you're using any cloud provider today, you're probably using their control planes, their proprietary control planes. And you can think of Crossplane as a universal control plane that you can actually layer on top of other cloud infrastructure and use it to manage infrastructure and connect it to your applications across the board. So multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premise scenarios are all supported. It's based on Kubernetes, the Kubernetes control plane, which is exciting because it means that you're probably already familiar with it. You know how to keep CTL apply and use Crossplane or use any of your favorite tool or the amazing projects in the CNCF landscape and ecosystem that are around us. If you look at a lot of these projects which become part of CNCF, most of these projects are already being used in production. So when these projects move to Sandbox, it's already running somewhere in production. So what impact you saw when once the project moved to CNCF Sandboxing? How does it help? As I said, there is already a user-based but sandboxing. And moving a project to CNCF plays a very big role in adoption. People have confidence in that project that they know it's under a neutral body now. So talk about some of the impact or accomplishment that you saw ever since it moved into Sandbox. So let me tease that apart. There are two personas that are probably impacted by your questions. So first, the end user community. The end user community obviously looks at the CNCF and CNCF projects as a potential place where they can figure out what to adopt next in their platform and in their production deployments. And so by having Crossplane be part of the CNCF as a project, I think it raises its profile in some ways and ensures that the end user community is considering it when they're looking at the modernization effort that they're embarking on. As for the end user community, obviously moving from Sandbox to incubation, the criteria there is all around adoption and production deployments. And Crossplane obviously has a ton of production deployments right now. And so in large, large companies to small companies, everybody's adopting Crossplane. So it's really nice to see from that perspective, the transition to incubation project, which is a reflection of its adoption in the end user community. For the ecosystem, it's also important to have it as a CNCF project because it ensures that there's a neutral governing body around us that is where the IP is held and ensures that there's an open governance model that we follow in Crossplane. So vendors like AWS or Google or Azure or VMware, Red Hat, et cetera can look at Crossplane and have been looking at Crossplane working with us on it as something that they can adopt in their products or something that they can recommend to their customers without fearing a single vendor controlling the project or other things that you see around projects that don't follow an open governance model. So both aspects are important to us and this is why we as UpBound donated Crossplane to the CNCF about a year ago and we're excited to see it rise up the ranks in the CNCF and we're excited about the next stage. So congratulations, hopefully early next year we'll start that process. When you do move a project into a neutral foundation, you lose control over the project. You do not have that much sway as you would have also when it's an internal company project you can move at your own pace based on your own customer feedback. When your project becomes part of a foundation it slows down a bit, it becomes more stable. So how do you kind of balance because as you said you are venture funded so you have to kind of convince a lot of folks too. So, but open source is a win-win game, it's not a lose, you know, some game. So talk about what value do you see in contributing or donating a project into a foundation? So the CNCF is actually fairly unique in its approach. The CNCF doesn't enforce or mandate that a project follows a certain governance structure. They let each project self-govern. We as the cross-plane committee have chosen a governance model for cross-plane. It's actually one that follows the governance model that we had in Rook and also the model that Kubernetes itself follows. And it's one that's designed to be inclusive, it's one that's designed so that anyone, any vendor competitive or not can be part of the community, can actually build on top of these projects and use them cross-plane follows, like I said, the lead of Kubernetes, which is very widely adopted by vendors. And in fact, we have just applied for the conformance program to start a conformance program around cross-plane in the CNCF. And there are a number of vendors that have plans now to be certified cross-plane providers and as well as distributions of cross-plane. And that's something that ensures that the ecosystem is healthy, ensures that we are all working together on a project that can benefit the community and can be, regardless of whether there are commercial competition or commercial ambitions are on the project, that they're still benefit to the community and to the industry as a whole. Excellent. Thanks for explaining that. If you just go back to the incubation and sandboxing, can you share, what are the criteria that a project has to meet before it moves from sandboxing to incubation and ultimately graduation? Yeah, so the criteria to incubation is primarily rooted in production deployments by the end-user community. So the more end-users that have adopted a project and adopted in ways that actually are critical to what they are doing in their journey towards cloud natives and cloud in general. That's the criteria. Cross-plane, if you read the incubation proposal, there are tens of companies that have self-nominated to be included there and they've talked about their production deployments and the technical oversight committee at the CNCF actually calls and interviews each of them and it's a lengthy process to get to that. And so that's primarily the criteria around incubation. And then the graduation, I'd say the primary criteria is obviously increased production deployments from the end-user community but also diversity of contributors and maintainers around the project. So I remember when we took Rook to graduation that was a pretty important criteria to get it there because you had to show that, not only is it being adopted in the end-user community but the vendor community was actually adopting it and using it and they were contributing resources to run it. And so that's another part of the criteria. And cross-plane is actually quite diverse from that standpoint today, half, more than half of the maintainers on cross-plane don't have upbound emails, which is a really, really great place to be and that trend is going to increase as the project continues to grow. What kind of roadmap is there for the project? Cross-plane is interesting in a sense that it obviously touches a lot of different other projects and products from different vendors. So for a universal control plane to be truly universal it needs to access infrastructure from across the entire spectrum of vendors. And so a big part of our focus as a cross-plane community is to increase coverage of what infrastructure and API that cross-plane can touch. And so that's a big focus for the community and you'll see more and more work that's happening there both in terms of implementing support for certain vendors, but also working with the community to make it easier for them to contribute and make it easier for them to add support for cross-plane and working on tooling to support the ecosystem around this. So that's a big focus for the community. The developer experience around cross-plane and building a big feature that we have in the cross-plane project is a feature called composition which lets platform teams essentially build their own API endpoints that have all the guardrails and policies and compliance and governance in place to let developers self-service on infrastructure which if you follow what's happening around self-service and developer portals and shifting infrastructure to the left that's a big focus for us in cross-plane and you'll see more from the community around custom compositions and improving the features around composition and especially the developer experience around it. Vassam, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about cross-plane. What really these sandboxing incubation and aggression that really mean? So thanks for sharing those insights and I wish we could have done this in person but hopefully things will settle down by next year and we will be doing these interviews again in person. Thanks for your time today. Yeah, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be here and then looking forward to meeting again in person.