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Manage external resources with providers

Upbound Crossplane is the AI-native distribution of Crossplane. Control planes are the only way to build and support an autonomous infrastructure platform for the age of autonomous systems, serving both humans and AI. Crossplane offers an extensive library of managed resources you can use to manage almost any cloud provider or cloud native software.

tip

This quickstart is suitable for users who want to manage external services using ready-made custom resources.

For users who want to build workflows for templating resources and exposing them as simplified resource abstraction, read the Get Started guide

Prerequisites​

This quickstart takes around 10 minutes to complete. You should be familiar with cloud concepts.

For this quickstart, you need:

  • the Upbound CLI installed.
  • a Docker-compatible container runtime installed on your system and running.
  • an AWS account

Create a local cluster​

For this example, you need to create a local cluster with kind or a similar Docker-compatible container runtime.

kind create cluster

Install Upbound Crossplane​

Install Upbound Crossplane on your local cluster with the up CLI:

up uxp install

Upbound installs UXP on your local cluster via Helm chart.

Install the provider​

Upbound Crossplane provides a library of pre-built managed resources that you can use to manage external services.

Create a new directory for this quickstart:

mkdir managed-resource-qs && cd managed-resource-qs

Create a new file called provider.yaml and install the Official AWS provider for the S3 managed resource:

managed-resource-qs/provider.yaml
apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: crossplane-contrib-provider-aws-s3
spec:
  package: xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/provider-aws-s3:v2.0.0

Next, apply the provider to your local cluster:

kubectl apply --filename provider.yaml

A Crossplane provider installs support for a set of related managed resources. The AWS S3 provider installs support for all the AWS S3 managed resources.

Create provider credentials​

With the provider installed, the control plane needs credentials to connect to AWS. The provider needs credentials to create and manage AWS resources. Providers use a Kubernetes secret to connect the credentials to the provider.

Generate a new secret from your AWS key-pair. Review the [AWS documentation][aws-documentation] for more information on how to generate AWS access keys.

Create a new file called aws-credentials.ini and paste your aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = 
aws_secret_access_key =

Save the file.

Create a Kubernetes secret that references your aws-credentials.ini file:

kubectl create secret generic aws-secret \
  --namespace=crossplane-system \
  --from-file=creds=./aws-credentials.ini

Configure the provider​

Now that your cluster has access to your AWS credentials, you need to create a ProviderConfig that tells the provider to load credentials from the secret.

Create a new file called clusterproviderconfig.yaml and paste the configuration below:

apiVersion: aws.m.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  credentials:
    source: Secret
    secretRef:
      namespace: crossplane-system
      name: aws-secret
      key: creds

Save the file and apply the provider configuration:

kubectl apply --filename providerconfig.yaml

Create a managed resource​

Now that you've installed and configured the provider, you can create the managed resource.

Create a new file called bucket.yaml and paste the configuration below:

apiVersion: s3.aws.m.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: Bucket
metadata:
  namespace: default
  generateName: crossplane-bucket-
spec:
  forProvider:
    region: us-east-2

Save the file and apply the managed resource to your control plane:

kubectl create -f bucket.yaml

Inspect your cluster to verify Crossplane created the bucket:

kubectl get buckets.s3.aws.m.upbound.io

Clean up​

When you're done with this guide, remember to delete your resources:

kubectl delete buckets.s3.aws.m.upbound.io crossplane-bucket-<your-bucket-name>

Delete your local cluster:

kind delete cluster

Next steps​

In this guide, you created a local Upbound Crossplane instance, and deployed managed resources.

Next, learn more about how Crossplane can deploy cloud resources and manage external services: