Crossplane Joins CNCF Sandbox: A Milestone for Cloud‑Native Application Management
On June 24, 2020 the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee approved eleven projects into the Sandbox, including Crossplane’s OAM Kubernetes implementation, signaling the transfer of ownership to the CNCF community and highlighting upcoming features that will standardize application component dependencies, data injection, and versioning for hybrid‑cloud environments.
Background
On June 24, 2020 the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) restructured the Sandbox tier and approved eleven projects in a single round, one of which was the Open Application Model (OAM) Kubernetes implementation known as the Crossplane project.
Crossplane’s Role in the CNCF Sandbox
Crossplane is a control plane for managing applications and cloud services in hybrid‑cloud scenarios. It builds on declarative Kubernetes APIs, follows the OAM standard, and abstracts cloud services in a provider‑agnostic, user‑friendly way.
With the CNCF Sandbox graduation, all code, documentation, and ownership of the OAM Kubernetes runtime and the Crossplane project itself are transferred to the CNCF community, decoupling the project from its original commercial backers (Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft Azure).
Key Repository Links
https://github.com/crossplane/oam-kubernetes-runtimehttps://github.com/crossplane/crossplaneCurrent Development Focus
The three core maintainers (three from Alibaba Cloud, one from Microsoft Azure, and others from Upbound.io) are advancing several critical features for the next OAM Kubernetes Runtime release:
Standardized definition and management of dependency relationships between application components and operational capabilities.
Definition and automated injection of data flows between components and operational capabilities.
Versioned definition and management of application components.
These enhancements will enable platform developers to build their own application management platforms on top of the K8s plugin more effectively.
Architecture Refactoring
The maintainers are also refactoring the codebase so that each major function—such as OAM application definition, K8s API composition, cloud‑service infrastructure management, and plugin packaging—resides in an independent controller. This modular approach gives users the freedom to install and depend on only the pieces they need.
Community and Governance
The OAM project, initiated by Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft Azure, enjoys a vibrant international community with contributors from companies like MasterCard, Oracle, and Fourth Paradigm. The community holds bi‑weekly meetings in both the US and China time zones, facilitating cross‑company collaboration on traits and workloads.
Overall, Crossplane’s donation to CNCF represents a significant milestone for developers building scalable, standardized Kubernetes application platforms within the cloud‑native ecosystem.
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