History
Origin
Crossplane was created by Upbound in 2018 as a "universal multicloud control plane." The GitHub repository was created on 2018-09-08. The idea was to manage infrastructure across clouds through the Kubernetes API rather than through a separate CLI and state file. The origin and milestones are recounted in the CNCF graduation blog.
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Created and open-sourced by Upbound; repository created 2018-09-08 |
| 2020 | Accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 2020-06-25 |
| 2021 | Promoted to CNCF Incubating on 2021-09-14, around the v1.0 milestone |
| 2025 | v2.0 released in August with a reworked architecture |
| 2025 | Graduated by the CNCF (graduated 2025-10-28, announced 2025-11-06) |
How it evolved
The major architectural shift was Crossplane v2 in August 2025. It removed patch-and-transform composition and made composition entirely function-based, where each step is a gRPC service. v2 also added namespaced composite resources and the ability to compose any Kubernetes resource, and it deprecated claims. These changes are described in What's New in v2.
Governance and project infrastructure matured alongside the code. Graduation required two third-party security audits, vendor-neutral governance, an OpenSSF Best Practices badge, an LTS policy, moving the release infrastructure to CNCF ownership, and standing up the community registry xpkg.crossplane.io. These requirements are listed in the CNCF graduation announcement and the graduation blog. The application that tracked the process is cncf/toc#1397.
Where it stands now
Crossplane is a CNCF Graduated project. The latest stable release at the documented commit was v2.3.2 (2026-06-09); the pinned main HEAD sits after that release and before v2.4.0-rc.0. Package distribution moved to the community registry xpkg.crossplane.io as part of graduation. The CNCF project page tracks the maturity timeline.