Upbound offers the browser-based Consumer portal tool that lets you manage resources on your control planes through a graphical interface. Use the Consumer Portal to manage your resources if you prefer using a user-interface through the browser.

As an alternative, you can use Kubernetes-compatible RESTful API offered by each control plane.

Consumer portal features

The Consumer Portal provides:

• Access to all your control planes on Upbound
• A dashboard showing recent created composite resource claims (XRCs) for a selected control plane
• Easy access to all composite resource claim APIs on your control plane

The Consumer portal shows composite resource claim types only. If a composite resource isn’t claimable, it isn’t selectable in the Consumer portal. When a user selects from available composite resource claim types, the portal shows a list view of all claims associated with that type.

The Consumer portal offers a dynamic create form-based experience for each composite resource claim type. The form experience is dynamically created based on the schema of the composite resource’s definition (XRD).

Generate Kubernetes object manifests

When you create a resource using the Consumer portal, Upbound shows the Kubernetes object YAML request that’s used to create this resource. You can use the portal form as a way to:

• view a sample YAML-based object request
• build your own YAML object request using a graphical interface
• copy the YAML request and use it in GitOps pipelines

Design an XRD for the Consumer portal

To explain how the Consumer portal form dynamically renders, consider a composite resource claim with a shape like below:

apiVersion: platform.acme.co/v1alpha1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
  namespace: default
spec:
  parameters:
    initialNodeCount: 1
    location: eu-west-1
    networkRef:
      name: network-ref-team1
    project: my-project

Resource basics

Composite resource claims are namespace-scoped objects. Every composite resource claims requires a name (.metadata.name) and namespace (.metadata.namespace). The form presents these fields in the first step of the form under a section titled Resource basics.

Dynamic form steps

The form experience uses .spec.parameters as a reserved field to dynamically generate the remaining steps in the form. Basic types defined under .spec.parameters are generated in the form under a section titled General. The fields initialNodeCount, location, and project are examples of this.

Object types defined under .spec.parameters cause new steps to be generated under their own section titled the same as the object type name. The field networkRef is an example of this.

The Consumer portal form only creates new steps for immediate objects under .spec.parameters. Nested object types are rendered as sub-sections in a step under the parent object.

Advanced

Crossplane appends a set of built-in fields onto a composite resource claim. These fields are:

• compositeDeletePolicy
• compositionRef
• compositionRevisionRef
• compositionRevisionSelector
• compositionSelector
• publishConnectionDetailsTo
• resourceRef
• writeConnectionSecretToRef

These fields are advanced fields that aren’t used often by most users. These fields are grouped in the final step of the form under a section titled Advanced.