IBM recently joined the Crossplane community and released an experimental release of a Crossplane provider for IBM Cloud, enabling IBM Cloud managed resources to be exploited from Crossplane.

Crossplane is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project that provides the ability to manage infrastructure and resources, including cloud managed services using Kubernetes CRDs, and has contributions and support from a number of major vendors.

These include Microsoft, Alibaba, GitLab, and Red Hat, as well as Upbound, which founded the Crossplane project two years ago.

The experimental release provides a set of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and Controllers to provision and manage IBM Cloud infrastructure and services from the Crossplane control plane.

The provider currently provides the following features: provision and manage 85+ hosted services and their credentials from the IBM Cloud Catalog; import existing IBM Cloud services into the provider and use Go templating to shape credentials for the requirements of applications.

Over the coming weeks, the company plans to enhance the provider with additional IBM Cloud APIs including IBM Cloud Databases and IAM, and maintain API compatibility of the provider using code generation against the OpenAPI specs from the IBM Cloud Services.