AWS Infrastructure with Kubernetes and Crossplane

For provisioning AWS infrastructure such as S3 buckets, RDS and co., engineers typically use tools such as CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, Ansible and co.

Engineers who work with the Kubernetes API on a daily basis, however, don’t necessarily want to rely on the classic provisioning tools, but rather want to provision cloud provider infrastructure using the Kubernetes API. Crossplane is a framework that bridges this gap. With its growing number of providers for AWS, Azure and GCP, among others, Crossplane provides the foundation to provision virtually any form of infrastructure via Kubernetes, as long as the infrastructure service provides an API.

However, Crossplane unleashes its full power with the ability to abstract complex infrastructure setups behind a self-defined API. For companies with many development teams, this is a great way to build high-level infrastructure self-services, based on public cloud providers.

In a workshop format, I get into deploying Crossplane on a Kubernetes cluster with the attendees. We will get Crossplane up and running as a framework, set up the AWS provider, learn about Managed Resources and create a simple infrastructure setup with a custom API definition. The workshop is aimed at people with a solid knowledge of Kubernetes, as well as basic knowledge of AWS. Access to your own Dev AWS account is required for the workshop, a cluster running on your own Workplace is sufficient as a Kubernetes cluster.