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\[32:09\] I'm also wondering - this is another component which I would like to introduce in our stack, which I feel will solve a lot of the runs on the "It runs on my computer" sort of thing, "It doesn't work on Jerod's computer." I mean different Jerods, Jerod Santo from Changelog. And I'm wondering, what is the relat... |
**Dan Mangum:** Absolutely. I'm really glad you brought that up, because a ton of Crossplane users we're seeing are using Argo CD, and that's definitely something both in the Crossplane ecosystem and Upbound Cloud that we're definitely in support of. Typically, when folks are using Argo CD, a lot of times with any suff... |
So a big thing that can be enhanced is now alongside your applications the infrastructure is defined in the same repo... I know you mentioned you like monorepos, so we can definitely give you that experience. And you can start using GitOps to provision your database, or using GitOps to provision your CDN, or something ... |
And because there's a standardization on the Kubernetes API, that means if you're running Crossplane on your Linode Kubernetes service, then Argo CD can target that; if you're running a hosted control plane on Upbound Cloud, where we actually run Crossplane for you on our own infrastructure, then you can target that wi... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What would you recommend, Jared? Would you recommend that we set up a Kubernetes cluster where we run Crossplane, and that controls everything else? Or would you recommend that we use Upbound Cloud. |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, I think it depends on what you're going for, I think. I think that the model in Upbound Cloud works really well if you want to have a single, centralized control plane that is going to be managing a lot of other control planes in other places, so it becomes kind of a central point of managing all... |
I think it's a perfectly relevant model as well, too... If you're running one cluster or you want to have it on premises, then you can run a Crossplane instance yourself there, and it'll have all the workloads, all the applications, all the services within one single place as well, too. It's a perfectly fine model for ... |
One thing that we started doing as well too is that we actually have released a distribution of Crossplane that helps you run Crossplane on premises; even if you're not going to run the hosted Crossplane instance inside of Upbound Cloud, you can still connect it to Upbound Cloud and get all those observability and mana... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** One of the biggest reasons why I think I would want us to use Upbound Cloud is because the most important thing that controls everything else is a managed service. So if there's an issue with Kubernetes - well, we don't know about that. Actually, we don't even care how you run that managed Crossplane ... |
**Dan Mangum:** \[36:10\] Absolutely. And one of the things that I think is a really important distinction here from other ways to provision infrastructure - so you have your kind of legacy ClickOps, if you will, where you go into the console and you create it -- |
**Gerhard Lazu:** No, hang on... This is too good. Please say that one more time. This is so good... This is the first time I hear that, and I love that... I think others need to take notice. We can't just skim over it; this was too good. Please say that one more time. |
**Dan Mangum:** I definitely can't take credit for the term, but the term is ClickOps, where you go in and provision your infrastructure by clicking around in the console. I don't know who to attribute for that, but it's certainly not myself. But hopefully, that's not what most organizations are doing... But kind of th... |
One of the things that could be nice about that is that you don't have a service that you have to worry about to provision that infrastructure. You run it from your local machine. The drawback of that is that if you're not actively running something, then that infrastructure is free to change or be modified, and that's... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I mean, even if -- we're not a big team, right? Changelog is a fairly small team, like 3-4 people... And some of us are spending very little time - myself included - on the actual infrastructure side; and I think people miss this. |
Now, we wouldn't want this knowledge to be stored in a wiki or captured in some docs, or even captured in some code. We would want this to be automated so that you don't need to know much once you encode what you want to happen. And as long as the control plane is a managed service, which is very important, then things... |
Now, if there is a problem in the integration with the providers - well, that's a separate problem. That will happen regardless. But at least, you don't need to be an expert in SRE, an expert in ops to run this thing; it just runs itself, literally. And that's a dream. You're literally automating yourself out of the jo... |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, and I think that something you said there, Gerhard, is kind of interesting as well, too. A lot of folks say "automating yourself out of a job", but in reality, what you're doing is you're automating yourself into an ability to handle more important problems. There's so many services and component... |
So the ability to automate and to offload some of that into managed services, or well-founded processes around automation as well too is really nice to be able to free you up, to be able to worry about more things that are important, and I guess recording other episodes of awesome podcasts as well too, in your case the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It's scary how well I could anticipate that. I was expecting one of you two to say what you've just said, Jared, and it's scary that I could anticipate that. It's like, wow. You're blowing my mind right now... Because you're right. What about rather than doing some tedious ops work, SRE work, what abo... |
\[40:30\] I mean, that's what I wanna see, and that's what I wanna promote... So thank you, Jared, for preparing everything so nicely for that mental picture. You're not automating yourself out of a job, but you're automating yourself out of tedious tasks... Which - they get old. I mean, if you've been doing this for 1... |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, and you could see the same exact thing Kubernetes did for applications, of being able to - instead of dealing with running services on a particular VM or making sure they're up and running with Systemd, Systemctl, whatever, being able to run those completely across an entire fleet of VMs, and hav... |
**Break**: \[41:32\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Is there anything else that I should keep in mind as I explore this Crossplane integration, Dan? |
**Dan Mangum:** I would really appreciate if you keep in mind the pain points. There's a lot of really powerful technology in Crossplane, especially around designing compositions, packaging configurations... But the experience is still a little bit painful, in my approximation. Right now, to design your schemas for you... |
That being said, that's an experience that we really want to improve, both in the Crossplane community, and on the Upbound Cloud side as a product. We've definitely started to invest in some of those areas, particularly around editor support, being able to do things in the browser... We recently had a hack week at Upbo... |
\[43:58\] So all types of input we get, whether it's folks coming in Slack, folks opening issues, jumping on calls with us or doing a podcast episode with us - those all help us make the product better. And the great thing that you've alluded to multiple times now - it's all open source, so if you want it to be differe... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You're ticking all my boxes right now. It's scary, literally. Slack, how to give feedback, GitHub, the experience, the focus... I'm hearing all the right things. It's scary how excited this makes me, so I have to dial it down a bit, because it's just like - again, you're ticking all my boxes. So - oka... |
How does this sound to you, Jared? ...if we wanted to use more than just Kubernetes to run our Changelog app in - I'm thinking multi-cloud; if we wanted for example to try out Flyio, and Render.com, and Kubernetes on Linode - what would that look like in Crossplane? Is it even possible? |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, that's a good question. I am not super-familiar myself with at least Fly; a little bit with Render... But I think something that's really important to remember here is that the machinery and framework in Crossplane is all there, such that the support for lots of infrastructure that already exists... |
And a lot of community people are building interesting things that we didn't expect as well either. For instance, the providers you expect in Crossplane to manage cloud resources like GCP and Azure etc. - those are all there. But then we've also got some community ones to manage things like GitHub and GitLab, to be abl... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This reminds me a lot of how Terraform used to work, and how we used to use Terraform for many of these things, like managed DNS, for example; we used to have that integration. What is the comparison between Terraform and Crossplane, if any? |
**Dan Mangum:** Yeah, I think that's a question that we get a lot, and I know even on the Crossplane blog we have some posts about "What are the differences between them?" We've already talked about a few of them, one of them being that active reconciliation. That's kind of the obvious one. The difference between a con... |
You know, getting down into some more specific details... And this may not be super-applicable to Changelog, for instance, because you all have a small number of folks in your company - but you know, you may grow in the future. But one of the big parts that we think is really important about the Crossplane composition ... |
\[48:03\] That being said, whether you're executing on your local machine, or you have some sort of jump box that you log into that has the proper credentials - whatever gets rendered out at the end of that pipeline when all the modules are resolved and the conditionals are evaluated, you need to have those permissions... |
So one of the big aspects of composition, kind of getting into more of the technical implementation, is there's two flavors of every abstract type that you create, which you can optionally disable one of them, but - there's a cluster-scoped version, a Kubernetes cluster-scoped resource, and then a namespace-scoped reso... |
So you're never giving the app developer and their namespace credentials to even talk to AWS. You're giving them credentials to basically be able to provision what you've defined as an abstraction, which may go to AWS, may go to Linode, may go to your on-prem infrastructure... But that isolation is really important, an... |
And from an Upbound Cloud perspective, we're giving you services around managing your credentials and getting a view into your global infrastructure picture, being able to have a view of that graph, of the relationship of requesting infrastructure and what actually gets rendered out, and what credentials are being used... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a great answer, thank you very much for that. I'm sure this is something which I'll be referring back to, so I love having this recorded... Because I'm sure as I gain more experience with Crossplane, this will become more and more relevant, and even necessary to go beyond the getting started p... |
You mentioned - I think either Dan or Jared, I can't remember exactly who, but you mentioned about the hack week that you recently had at Upbound... And I'm wondering, Jared, what other things came out of that hack week that you were excited about? |
**Jared Watts:** Yeah, really good question. The hack week was something I was super-pumped about. I'm kind of more involved in engineering leadership these days than hands-on-keyboard technically focused... So that was something that for the team I was super-excited to make happen. So the whole guiding principle there... |
\[51:41\] I think in a hack week there's a lot of different ways you can take it, and it's really up to the individuals participating in it to get what they want out of it. For instance, some of the other things that came out of it - Dan had mentioned that provider Kubernetes had come out of it; so a brand new provider... |
So it was just a whole spectrum of things... People working together on some things in open source, some things for Upbound... There's been a lot of people making progress, and people get really inspired when they get to work on something that's very important to them internally as well, too. So that was just a really ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I love the sound of that. I'm wondering, is there a blog post or something public that people can go to and see these specific tools? |
**Jared Watts:** We just wrapped up the hack week recently... We had made a little bit of noise on social media about it on Twitter and stuff like that, and at the end of the week we did a demo session where we were kind of live tweeting information about it... So on Twitter there's a little bit of information, but I t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I would love to get that. So maybe by the time this episode goes live, I would love to have a link to put it in the show notes, so that others can see... Because there's a lot of cool stuff. |
One thing which I haven't heard, and maybe I'm getting confused as to whether this came out of the hack week or not - it's the k8s container registry. Dan, what can you tell us about that? |
**Dan Mangum:** Yeah, so k8s container registry was a project -- it's about a month old at this point... And for folks that aren't familiar, Crossplane (we've already said) uses OCI images for its packages... And it actually doesn't go through the Kubernetes node to be able to pull that. So on an individual Kubernetes ... |
Crossplane - our packages are very small, our OCI images are very small, because they actually just contain a stream of yaml in them... So we actually go directly from Crossplane to the registry and we pull that in. We have our own cache for those packages that are just stored in a volume and you can use whatever backi... |
So one of the things that I saw as a pain point when people were developing new packages was that they were having to build their package and push it to the registry and then install it declaratively into Crossplane. And this is a good model, and it's definitely really useful when you're consuming packages from elsewhe... |
Behind the scenes, the Kubernetes API server is just a REST API. And one of the endpoints for pods is the proxy endpoint. So k8s CR basically is just a CLI tool which will pull an image from your Docker daemon, or a tarball that you have on your local system, and it will push it to a registry running in your Kubernetes... |
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