Upbound Docs

Control Plane Configurations

Managed control planes expose a set of APIs for users to interact with their control planes. Configurations define these APIs.

Configurations are a Crossplane package that bundles a set of API definitions. Every Crossplane Configuration in the Upbound environment has its source synced directly from a Git repository. Users choose from this selection of Configurations in their Upbound environment when they want to install a set of APIs on a managed control plane.

How configurations work on Upbound

All managed control planes on Upbound install configurations from a definition stored in a Version Control Service. Configurations in Upbound are special objects that you can create directly from the Console or via the up CLI. When you create a Configuration choose to either:

start from a gallery of existing Configurations curated by Upbound
start from a scratch configuration, which is an empty configuration with a placeholder crossplane.yaml file

Upbound automatically creates a Git repository in your version control service provider on your behalf. After Upbound creates your repository, it watches for new commits to the main branch. For every commit, Upbound automatically attempts to build the Configuration package for you. If it’s successful, you can then upgrade the definition on your managed control planes.

Illustration of a Configuration stored in Git

Because Git is the source of truth for a control plane’s APIs, users can use typical Git workflows. Upbound deploys API changes out to their control planes once merged without users handling any of the package building processes.

Tip

The relationship of Configurations-to-MCPs is one-to-many. An MCP can only install from one (1) Configuration source. One Configuration source can be installed on many MCPs (and they can have different versions of the same Configuration installed).

Anatomy of a configuration

Creating a configuration in Upbound creates a Git repository. Configurations from the Upbound gallery contain:

crossplane.yaml - this file is where you name your configuration, declare dependencies on Crossplane providers, and other Configurations
apis folder - this folder is where you should define your XRDs and compositions.
.up/examples folder - this folder contains example claims that invoke APIs defined in the Configuration

If you choose to make a blank configuration, Upbound creates a crossplane.yaml file.

Tip

Configurations can declare dependencies on other Configurations. This lets you scope configurations to modular chunks based on a well-defined boundary, like grouping a set of related API definitions together.

Version control service integration

All Configurations in Upbound sync from Git. To learn more about how Upbound integrates with Version Control Services, read Git integration.

Building an API

To see a guide for how to build an API with Upbound and publish it to a control plane, read the Knowledge Base documentation.