Crossplane for Modern Cloud Infrastructure by Richard Johnson

"Crossplane for Modern Cloud Infrastructure"

"Crossplane for Modern Cloud Infrastructure" offers a comprehensive and authoritative exploration of Crossplane—an open-source, cloud-native control plane revolutionizing the way organizations manage and compose modern infrastructure. Beginning with a thoughtful historical perspective on Infrastructure as Code, the book gently guides readers through the evolution of control planes, contrasts Crossplane with traditional tools like Terraform and Pulumi, and introduces its powerful declarative composition model. Readers will gain a clear understanding of how Crossplane’s architectural principles and Kubernetes foundations enable platform engineering teams to create modular, scalable, and reusable internal developer platforms.

Through meticulously detailed chapters, the book provides a deep dive into Crossplane’s core concepts such as custom resource definitions (CRDs), controllers, composite resources, and managed resources. It covers the intricacies of integrating with a diverse set of cloud providers, authoring and maintaining custom providers, and operationalizing Crossplane within GitOps workflows. Readers will find practical guidance on secure configuration management, continuous delivery, drift detection, and advanced orchestration strategies for multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. Additionally, the book offers expert recommendations for optimizing performance, observability, self-healing patterns, and cost management at scale.

Designed for platform engineers, cloud architects, and SREs, this resource empowers professionals to build robust, compliant, and future-proof infrastructure solutions. The book concludes with advanced topics, including policy-driven orchestration, AI/ML pipeline integrations, and the evolving landscape of cloud-native automation. Whether you’re designing internal platforms, supporting diverse service portfolios, or navigating the future of cloud operations, "Crossplane for Modern Cloud Infrastructure" is your essential guide to adopting and mastering the next generation of infrastructure automation.