2 of my favorite CNCF projects are Backstage and Crossplane. just under 6 months ago we released the first versions of our Backstage plugins which integrate Crossplane and Backstage to the community. It has been great to see the growing interest and adoption of the plugins over the past few months. With over 3.5k downloads of the frontend plugin and over 7.6k downloads of the Kubernetes Ingestor plugin, we can see that adoption is growing, and so are external contributions to the plugins from multiple contributors from different companies which is really awesome to see.
I have had the priviledge of talking with multiple companies using these plugins, and the feedback has been really great.
At the end of May we had an awesome conference here in Israel called Platforma which was the first Platform Engineering conference in Israel. The conference itself was great, with good attendnace, great talks, and great ahllway conversations as well with some amazing technologists from many different and diverse companies all coming together to discuss Platform Engineering.
At Platforma I had the honor to speak and give a talk about Integrating Backstage and Crossplane. Bellow you can see the recording of the session which was a really fun one.
The feedback for the session was great, and was really cool to have multiple people come up to me afterwards and mention how they are already using these plugins in there organizations.
One question did keep coming up though, which was when we will add support for Crossplane V2.
Crossplane V2 is the upcoming major release of Crossplane which will include within it many hugely beneficial redesigns and improvements that the community are super excited about. for more information on what to expect with Crossplane V2 i recommend watching the bellow video:
As the changes are quite extensive, and the options have grown to supporitng multiple different API versions, scopes of resources, and modes of operation, I was hesitant at first to start this work until the Crossplane V2 design was finalized.
Whiel that was my initial plan, I kept getting more and more requests in GitHub issues, DMs on Slack, friends sending messages on Whatsapp and more. Finally I decided it was time to invest a bit of deisgn and development efforts to get this work started.
The benefit was that there were almost no breaking changes in Crossplane V2, so the changes were mostly additive and as such the code refactoring was less then initially expected,
I am glad to announce that the TeraSky-OSS Backstage plugins now include support for Crossplane V2 and V1 seamlessly and should work with all different supported permutations of the new APIs.
As the proposal itself for Crossplane V2 is not yet finalized, things may change, and new releases will need to be made, including breaking changes which may occur based on the final design of Crossplane V2 but we are commited to updating these plugins as the design matures and reaches its final state.
The current goal is for Crossplane V2 to GA in August 2025, but the preview version is already available including docs which have been revamped for Crossplane V2 and are available on the Crossplane site.
We also now have support for custom auth methods in the Kubernetes Inmgestor plugin thanks to an external contribution which now allows for integration of the plugins for example with the Upbound hosted control planes and not just with OSS Crossplane, again growing the possibilities and increasing the usability of the plugins.
If you are looking into Crossplane V2 and want a cool and nice UI to create XRs and to visualize and manage them day2 all following GitOps practices, go try out the plugins!
Thanks again to the awesome Backstage and Crossplane communities for all the feedback and the growing number of contributions in recent months!