Managed control planes (MCPs) are Crossplane control plane environments that are fully managed by Upbound. Upbound manages:
- the underlying lifecycle of infrastructure hosting the MCP
- scaling of the infrastructure
- the maintenance of the core Crossplane components that make up a managed control plane.
This lets users focus on building their APIs and operating their control planes, while Upbound handles the rest. Each managed control plane has its own dedicated API server connecting users to their MCP.
Architecture
Users running open source Crossplane may face scalability limitations when attempting to create control planes that can manage lots of resources. Kubernetes clusters running Crossplane install hundreds or thousands of Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRD
s) increasing the CPU and memory requirements of the Kubernetes API server.
With Upbound managed control planes, these limitations don’t apply. MCPs scale to >1000 CRDs without a performance degradation. Upbound has complete control over the lifecycle management of a control plane. Upbound ensures that the control plane is right-sized and given the appropriate memory and CPU for the required CRDs.
Versioning
MCPs use Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP), Upbound’s enterprise-grade open source distribution of Crossplane. Upbound fully manages the UXP installation. Whenever Upbound releases a new version of UXP, Upbound automatically upgrade your MCP to the latest version.
MCP management
Create an MCP
You can create a new managed control plane from the Upbound Console, up CLI, or provider-upbound.
To use the CLI, run the following, specifying which configuration to install on the control plane and what the name should be.
up ctp create --configuration-name=<configuration> <name-of-control-plane>
To learn more about control plane-related commands in up
, go to the CLI reference documentation.
You can declaratively create managed control planes in Upbound with provider-upbound. Provider-upbound is a Crossplane provider for interacting with the Upbound SaaS APIs. As with any Crossplane provider, you need to have:
- installed the provider on a control plane. This can be a managed control plane or a control plane running outside of Upbound.
- created a valid ProviderConfig
Create a managed control plane by creating the following resource:
#controlplane-a.yaml
apiVersion: mcp.upbound.io/v1alpha1
kind: ControlPlane
metadata:
name: controlplane-a
spec:
forProvider:
configuration: your-config
description: controlplane-a
organizationName: your-organization
You need to specify your organization name and a valid configuration that you created prior in Upbound. Apply it to the management control plane where you installed provider-upbound:
kubectl apply -f controlplane-a.yaml
Connect directly to your MCP
All managed control planes have a deterministic Kubernetes API server endpoint in the following form:
https://proxy.upbound.io/v1/controlPlanes/<account>/<control-plane-name>/k8s
Generate a kubeconfig
file for a managed control plane
with the following up CLI command.
up ctp kubeconfig get -a <account> <control-plane-name> -f <kubeconfig-file> --token <token>
up
CLI uses personal access tokens to authenticate to Upbound. You can generate a personal access token from the Upbound Console.Configure Crossplane providers on your MCP
ProviderConfigs with OpenID Connect
Use OpenID Connect (OIDC
) to authenticate to Upbound managed control planes without credentials. OIDC lets your managed control plane exchange short-lived tokens directly with your cloud provider. To learn how to configure a Crossplane Provider on managed control plane to use Upbound’s OIDC, read the Knowledge Base documentation.
Generic ProviderConfigs
The Upbound Console can’t edit ProviderConfigs. To edit ProviderConfigs on your managed control plane, connect to the MCP directly by following the previous instructions on connecting directly to an MCP.
Control plane backups
Upbound automatically captures snapshots of an MCP state every 24 hours. These backups aren’t directly available to users. Contact Upbound Support to restore a backup.