ArgoCD with Terraform and Crossplane: Managing Infrastructure Alongside Applications

Calendar February 22, 2026
Cicd
Intermediate
Gitops-Infrastructure, Crossplane-Patterns, Argocd-Patterns
Argocd, Gitops, Crossplane, Terraform, Infrastructure-as-Code, Cloud-Resources
Argocd, Crossplane, Terraform, Kubectl, Helm

ArgoCD with Terraform and Crossplane#

Applications need infrastructure – databases, queues, caches, object storage, DNS records, certificates. In a GitOps workflow managed by ArgoCD, there are two approaches to provisioning that infrastructure: Crossplane (Kubernetes-native) and Terraform (external). Each has different strengths and integration patterns with ArgoCD.

Crossplane: Infrastructure as Kubernetes CRDs#

Crossplane extends Kubernetes with CRDs that represent cloud resources. An RDS instance becomes a YAML manifest. A GCS bucket becomes a YAML manifest. ArgoCD manages these manifests exactly like it manages Deployments and Services.