The creators of the Crossplane model recently announced the launch of its latest version. With platform engineers as its primary focus, Crossplane 1.14 stands as the grandest release of the project, introducing a plethora of benefits with many new functionalities. The command-line interface (CLI) has been re-energized with several commands, which deem useful for control plane creation and supervision, thereby strengthening the toolbox of platform engineers.
New commands like init (for project initiation), build and push (to package and distribute to a registry), install (to deploy the package into a control plane), render (to test composition logic), and trace (for examining live resources) have been added to the CLI. The last two commands, render and trace, are particularly significant as per the project maintainers. These commands streamline the testing process for compositions before live cluster deployment and facilitate specific resource inspection correspondingly.
Particularly useful for root cause analysis, this latest edition's trace command investigates and examines live resources, while the innovative render command allows developers to visualize their compositions before moving forward, verifying their correctness beforehand. The previous scarcity of composition testing before live clustering is indulgently addressed with this feature.
Also launched in this latest version is the Composition Functions beta, an advancement which permits developers to write custom logic with any chosen language. Supplementing this, generic Functions offered by the project lighten the coding burden for developers.
Jared Watts, co-creator, maintainer, and steering committee member of Crossplane, has suggested the potential for an upcoming ecosystem of tradable Functions in the Upbound Marketplace. These built-in functions are expected to cater to common scenarios that the traditional composition based on patch and transform abilities could not handle previously. This combined flexibility of using any language for custom logic or reusing the generic Functions opens up an array of new possibilities for those erecting control planes with Crossplane.
Crossplane 1.14 also marks the introduction of the Usage API, which facilitates the declaration of dependency relationships between resources. The underlying intention here is to address the problem of orphaned resources being left behind when Crossplane fails to tidy up all resources. This problem arises when a dependent resource gets deleted before its parent resource, leaving Crossplane helpless, unable to delete the remaining resource. The new Usage functionality reasons over the original deletion rules and blocks deletion of dependent resources.
With more investments directed towards enhancing the developer experience and revolutionizing methods of constructing control planes, the forthcoming major release of Crossplane has already generated an air of anticipation, schedulded for January 2024.
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