Crossplane is now a Graduated CNCF project

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has officially announced that Crossplane is now a Graduated project. (cncf.io)
This confirms what we at VSHN AG have known for years: Crossplane is no longer an experiment. It’s a mature, production-ready technology backed by a strong community and solid governance.

Key facts

• Crossplane was open-sourced in 2018 (blog.upbound.io)
• It was accepted to CNCF in 2020 and entered incubation in 2021 and has now reached the Graduated maturity level on October 28, 2025 (cncf.io)
• Over 3,000 contributors from 450+ organizations actively shape the project (cncf.io)

Why this is important

Graduation within CNCF means stability, proven governance, and community maturity.
For the cloud-native and platform engineering world, this is a clear signal: Crossplane is not just an interesting idea – it’s a cornerstone of modern infrastructure management.
For us at VSHN, it reinforces our long-standing trust in the technology and confirms our choice to build on a project that’s open, well-governed, and future-proof.

How VSHN Uses Crossplane

At VSHN, we’ve been working with Crossplane in production since early 2021.
We were among the early adopters in Europe to embrace its declarative approach to cloud-native infrastructure management and have since built essential parts of our service platform on top of it.
We use all major components of Crossplane – including Compositions, Composition Functions, Claims, Providers, and Configurations – to standardize and automate how we deliver infrastructure and applications across clouds.

Where we use Crossplane

• Application Catalog – Our unified catalog of deployable applications and services for customers and partners is powered by Crossplane. It provides consistent definitions, templates, and provisioning logic that can run on any Kubernetes or OpenShift environment.
• Servala Control Plane – Crossplane plays a key role in the orchestration layer of Servala, our Sovereign App Store. It manages and provisions services across different cloud providers and on-prem environments, ensuring that everything remains open, compliant, and vendor-independent.

How it helps us (and our customers)

• Enables self-service provisioning of applications and services without manual intervention
• Provides a single control plane for managing infrastructure across multiple cloud and on-prem environments
• Makes our deployments repeatable, auditable, and compliant by design
• Allows us to integrate and scale services easily across our multi-cloud ecosystem – from Exoscale and Cloudscale to on-prem enterprise setups

Related Reading

Want to learn more about how we use Crossplane at VSHN? Check out our other blog posts:

• Crossplane – The Control-Plane of the future
• Composition Functions in Production
• VSHN: a Pioneering Crossplane Partner
• How we used Crossplane for the things we should not have
• Crossplane Service Broker
• VSHN is also leading the Crossplane Competence Center Switzerland

Conclusion

Crossplane’s CNCF Graduation is more than a badge – it is proof that the project has matured into a reliable, production-ready standard for cloud-native infrastructure.
We are proud to have been part of this journey from the early days, using Crossplane to build scalable, compliant, and open platforms like the VSHN Application Catalog and the Servala Control Plane.

Want to learn how Crossplane can power your platform?
📬 Get in touch with us

Did you know?

VSHN also has a CNCF Sandbox project: K8up – the backup operator for Kubernetes.
It is another example of how we contribute to and shape the cloud-native ecosystem together with the community.