Upbound Secures $60M to Expand Crossplane Multi-Cloud Management

Addressing Multi-Cloud Complexity with Upbound and Crossplane

Organizations are increasingly seeking to avoid vendor lock-in, a common challenge experienced in the past. Consequently, a multi-cloud strategy is becoming prevalent. However, this approach introduces a new difficulty: the need for a unified tool to oversee all cloud environments.

The Rise of Crossplane

Previously, companies largely depended on individual cloud providers for managing their respective services. While solutions such as Google Anthos and Red Hat OpenShift emerged, a truly open source alternative was lacking until Upbound introduced Crossplane in May 2020.

The significance of the problem identified by Upbound was acknowledged by investors, resulting in a $60 million Series B funding round. This investment aims to further develop the open source project and expand the commercial offerings. Altimeter Capital spearheaded the round, with contributions from GV, Intel Capital, and Telstra Ventures.

A Community-Driven Approach

Upbound’s founder and CEO, Bassam Tabbara, asserts that existing solutions have not adequately addressed the management challenge. He believes his company is pioneering a community-focused approach to create a universal control plane and a single API for managing cloud resources.

“Numerous attempts have been made to establish a centralized control point,” Tabbara explained. “However, none have tackled the issue by fostering an open source community and building convergence around it.”

He further stated, “Crossplane represents the first instance of achieving a convergence effect around a single, universal cloud API. This is unprecedented. Currently, Crossplane provides a declarative API capable of managing all cloud resources and infrastructure across various vendors.”

Cloud-Native and CNCF Backing

The project is designed to be fully cloud-native and operates under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF also oversees crucial open source cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes.

Crossplane empowers users to select their preferred cloud vendors – encompassing infrastructure providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, as well as cloud-native tools such as Elastic, Confluent, Databricks, and Snowflake – and manage them all through a unified API.

Commercial Offerings and Vendor Integrations

Alongside nurturing the open source project, Upbound has developed a commercial product, also named Upbound. Customers can either self-install this product within their chosen cloud environment or utilize a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version managed by Upbound.

Adoption is growing, and major vendors including AWS, Azure, Equinix, and IBM are actively building integrations for Crossplane. This trend mirrors the support major cloud providers demonstrated for Kubernetes and the CNCF in 2017.

A Potential Turning Point

“We are witnessing a genuine convergence effect around Crossplane, similar to what occurred with Kubernetes and Linux,” Tabbara noted.

The project and its commercial vision hold substantial promise, positioning it as a potentially critical component of the cloud landscape. Investors are demonstrating their confidence through significant capital investment. Whether Upbound can successfully realize this vision remains to be seen, but the potential for transformative change is evident.