What Crossplane Does#

Crossplane extends Kubernetes to provision and manage cloud infrastructure using the Kubernetes API. Instead of writing Terraform and running apply, you write Kubernetes manifests and kubectl apply them. Crossplane controllers reconcile the desired state with the actual cloud resources.

The real value is not replacing Terraform — it is building abstractions. Platform teams define custom resource types (like DatabaseClaim) that developers consume without knowing whether they are getting RDS, CloudSQL, or Azure Database. The composition layer maps the simple claim to the actual cloud resources.