text stringlengths 0 1.8k |
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**Jared Watts:** I'm gonna go like 1,300 is my guess. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Dan, do you wanna readjust, or are you happy with over a thousand? That's a bit generic. |
**Dan Mangum:** I'll go with 1,299. |
**Jared Watts:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. 1,838, across 24 contributors. That's a lot of changes. A lot of changes have happened since November 2019. Now, I would have loved to see how many lines have been deleted and added, but I couldn't, because the compare was just too big and I couldn't see that. Now, if we take a step back from th... |
**Dan Mangum:** A big part of the experience has actually changes as well, too. That's something I tell people a lot when I'm talking about somewhat of the history and the evolution of the Crossplane project... It took us a good while to land on the final experience here around compositions and building your own platfo... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So before we go into what are compositions and abstractions, Dan, what is Crossplane? |
**Dan Mangum:** So Crossplane is a way for infrastructure platform teams to build their own platform. A lot of folks come to it, and it's interesting that we talk about this 0.5 release to 1.3, because I think in a lot of ways the experience now kind of reflects the maturation of the project as well... So a lot of folk... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So are the abstractions in your description a database? Would that be an abstraction? And then the implementation would be specifically to a provider, or... Is that how that works? |
**Dan Mangum:** \[08:18\] Yup. It could absolutely be specific to a provider, and if you're across the different clouds, or you're across on-prem and on the cloud, those could be different implementations... But also different combinations of resources. For any single kind of abstract type or composite type, you can ha... |
So it may be the actual destination for where the underlying requests are being made, or it may be the configuration of the different resources that make up that abstract type. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes sense. And the composition - it comes as explained, like these things being composable, and then having -- do you have stacks, or what do you refer to those compositions like as a whole? Do they have a name? |
**Dan Mangum:** So the general mechanism is referred to as composition, which is also an API type in our schema. I think the closest thing to what you're describing right now is configuration packages. This is a way to basically say "This is an abstract type definition, this is the schema for it, this is a set of compo... |
We really like to see people doing -- what we do see really mature Crossplane users doing is composing compositions inside of each other. So if you describe an abstract type like a database, you may make that into a higher level type called an app, that may provision a VM in a database, or something like that. So you c... |
**Jared Watts:** To add onto that too, if I can... Getting back to what I was saying about how the experience has changed drastically in Crossplane over the past year and a half, something that's quite relevant here is that earlier on, in the earlier versions of our experience we were building, we as a project were def... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that makes a lot of sense, and I really like the way you think about this. I love it. However, there's another element which I feel is very important to this flexibility... How do you discover all those abstractions? Is there a central place that you go to just to see them? How do people share... |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, good question. So there's a couple different ways to do that, and Dan has done a lot of work on this, so you can jump in on that and add more, Dan, definitely... So we can package these abstractions up and share them in any OCI-compliant registry. So they have that sort of reuse, and the ability ... |
\[12:01\] We at Upbound are building a registry that has a lot of those rich discoverability and search and sharing type of features into it that can make it, you know, with the semantic understanding of these Crossplane packages, to make it more easy to find them and share them and reuse them etc. But at the end of th... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think you mentioned discoverability there, which is really important... So it's great to share them, but how will users discover them, and how will users understand how this, for example, abstraction combines with something else? How do you link them together? How do they -- a tree-like structure, o... |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, this experience is being built in our Upbound Cloud service that we're building. Our startup, Upbound - they're the creators of the Crossplane project, and we're building a SaaS product and a whole experience, an enterprise-focused experience around Crossplane. So since we have a complete underst... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes perfect sense. Anything to add, Dan, to that? |
**Dan Mangum:** Yeah, well I really liked that Jared pointed out that any OCI-compliant registry can host Crossplane packages. That makes them extremely portable, and that becomes really important when you're an organization that has potentially really high security concerns, or only run an on-prem setting, or somethin... |
But I know you mentioned this notion of a graph, which I think is a really big part of the untapped potential of the Crossplane community and kind of the marketplace around that. So I mentioned before that those configuration packages can declare dependencies, and you can kind of infinitely compose those. What happens ... |
So we actually generate a directed acyclic graph for all the packages that are installed, which gives you that powerful ability to create a reproducible platform, where you get to the point where if you just install that parent node, that top-level node in your DAG, then you're actually able to reproduce your platform ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That answers so many of the questions which I didn't ask, but think about, so thank you, Dan. That's perfect. There's one more question which I'm thinking about, because I know that we answered the What fairly well, like what it is; how it works - we went into that to a fair bit... But I don't think w... |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, great question. I think there's maybe two different branches of thought there to perhaps explore. The first one is that some of us that created the Crossplane project - we also created the Rook project as well, too. Rook is storage orchestration for Kubernetes. We found that in the early days of ... |
\[16:09\] So we found there that some of the work that the special interest group for storage in Kubernetes had done was really strong. Persistent volume claim, storage classes, things like that. And we found very early on that applying those same patterns for being able to dynamically provision storage would also work... |
So that was the original why of Crossplane, is "Hey, we've done great things with Kubernetes for storage... Let's do more infrastructure resources inside of Kubernetes and bring them in to being managed and provisioned and controlled by the control plane itself." |
And then beyond that, we've found that there's a very strong story too for businesses that are starting to have their own shared services infrastructure platform teams as well, too. They have a responsibility to provision infrastructure and get new services up and running for a whole set of application teams around the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I can see how this Why is captured really well in the cloud control plane, which is the abbreviation or the short explanation for what Crossplane is. But I think the Why goes deeper into "Why I would want to use it, why is it important." And I really like this idea -- I think, this is my perspectiv... |
**Dan Mangum:** I think I have a bit of a unique perspective on this, as someone who's a younger individual in the industry. I like to say that I kind of grew up in the Heroku generation, in that it was always really accessible for me to be able to get access to hardware, and folks in my generation. I have this familia... |
One of the things that when I was experimenting with those different services I noticed really quickly is you always were operating at someone else's defined level of abstraction. So AWS you can think of as being pretty granular, and you have to understand a lot of moving parts to be able to use it effectively. So you ... |
So my interpretation of Crossplane when I first saw it open sourced (I believe) at KubeCon Seattle in 2018, I was finishing up my schooling and I recognized it as something that was gonna really revolutionize the way that organizations were able to provide a platform like that... Because if I as an individual college s... |
**Break**: \[20:32\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You mentioned that about discovering all the things that made sense for other people - they package, they put out there. Jared, you mentioned about the Crossplane cloud, where I imagine that some of this exists; people can discover it, people can get started... I also imagine that some of these buildi... |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, I think that since this has been an open source project for over two years now, we've always been strongly believing in investing in the community as well, too... So we had to first build this experience and iterate on it to get to where we are today... But through that process we've gotten some ... |
I think that when you start getting to enterprise scenarios and you wanna get maybe some more visibility and a richer experience around the core concepts, then that's when you can start getting more involved with what we're building in Upbound cloud as well, too. For instance, if you want to manage a bunch of different... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[24:05\] I think that makes a lot of sense, because once you reach a certain scale, then you start having problems that you just wanna pay someone else to handle, because that's not the value that you're adding... And that makes perfect sense. But I'm wondering more around that discoverability featur... |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, let me take a quick stab at that one, too... So I think there's a couple different depths that you can start diving into. One is the open source upstream crossplane.io docs; they're very, very useful. We have a Getting Started guide that kind of introduces you into what is a composition, what is ... |
So that's a great place to get started, and I think that anybody that walks through that getting started guide on Crossplane.io, the docs there, is going to start understanding the concepts and start being productive there. |
To go another step further, something else that we've done in the open source is we've created a set of reference platforms. These are higher-level abstractions that start trying to show what are some scenarios, what are some use cases, what are some things you can accomplish that go a little bit deeper than just the H... |
So we have a handful of them... Some of them are around creating clusters and data services in the different cloud providers, like in AWS, or GCP... And then we've got one for how do you create a multi-cloud Kubernetes, how do you create an abstraction around Kubernetes and be able to provision a cloud of your choice, ... |
And then I did one in a recent talk as well too for a cloud-native. So we've created a cloud-native reference platform as well too, that composes together a lot of different projects within the CNCF ecosystem and shows some of the more modern approaches such as using GitOps and having observability and service mesh and... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like everything that you said so far, especially the dereference architectures... And I would really appreciate having some of the links, and this is why - in 2022, for the Changelog.com setup, I see Crossplane being part of it. So I would like to have less makefiles, have less commands to ru... |
\[27:57\] The other thing - and this is more of a nice-to-have - is integrations with Fastly, the CDN. There's certain configurations that would need to happen... And I know that this is not the \[unintelligible 00:28:06.29\] that we were talking about, like AWS, GCP, Azure; this is a CDN. But I see Crossplane fitting ... |
**Dan Mangum:** That sounds like a perfect use case, and I will admit that I listened to the 2021 infrastructure for Changelog.com episode, and you kind of enumerated that in the past - I think it was six months before that - you had kind of said "We're moving to Kubernetes to do this", and folks had said "You're runni... |
Getting to things like CDN - that's absolutely in scope for Crossplane. That's a little different from other infrastructure-as-a-service. But we have providers for all types of things, and that cloud-native platform that Jared was just mentioning - it makes use of a really important provider that I wanna bring up, and ... |
The first one is provider Helm. So what Jared's talking about is provisioning Kubernetes clusters, and then provisioning Helm charts into them, but that being a single package. So you create your Changelog.com instance as a Kubernetes object; behind the scenes that spins up a Kubernetes cluster, maybe it installs Linke... |
So I think altogether we're gonna have a lot of pieces for exactly what you wanna do, and something that would be really exciting to me is, you know, y'all might create a template or a configuration package for deploying a Phoenix web app, and someone else might come along and see that in the registry and say "Hm, I al... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's amazing. I knew that our journeys would meet at some point, and I think they were getting very close to that point where we start walking together, in a way... I'm very excited about discovering what it looks like. I'm imagining that your documentation has all the examples I need. I know exactl... |
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