Every day Upbounders wake up thinking about how to usher in a new era of cloud computing characterized by unprecedented customer choice, efficiency, and developer empowerment. Our mission is to enable customers to build, deploy, manage, secure, and consume their very own Internal Cloud Platforms on top of their cloud and on-premises infrastructure already in use.
Since launching Upbound earlier last year, we’ve come a long way as a company and wanted to share more information about why customers choose Upbound to power their Internal Cloud Platforms.
Every company is a cloud company today. Even if they’re not selling software, digital experiences running in the cloud are business-critical components for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
In order to meet the needs of customers, and deliver software faster. Organizations have created platform teams, groups of highly skilled SREs, to deploy Internal Cloud Platforms designed to give operators a central point of control and developers a paved road experience to getting applications to production.
In the old world, when engineers want to deliver solutions faster, they would have to determine and negotiate what tools they need, go through approvals and ultimately get bogged down by internal red tape.
Enter Upbound, a complete platform to manage infrastructure, eliminate configuration drift, and empower developers with self-service using our Universal Cloud Platform.
Upbound provides customers with 3 things:
- Paved road experiences for developers looking to use cloud infrastructure and deploy applications to production.
- A tailor-fit solution specifically addressing the customer's needs.
- Forward-thinking design such that any component can be modified as business needs evolve so that customers will never re-platform again!
What is unique about Upbound
Upbound is unique in that platform teams have the ability to build their own platform vs. buying something off the shelf like Anthos, Tanzu, OpenShift, Heroku or others. With Upbound, platform teams define custom interfaces like APIs, consoles, and CLIs for developers using the platform to deploy their apps to production.
With solutions like Anthos, Tanzu or OpenShift, platform teams are forced to align on opinionated and rigid rules about the level of abstraction e.g: how applications should be configured or defined, how a database should behave etc. These rules exist to provide platform teams with guardrails for their Internal Cloud Platforms, almost like a framework, but they’re completely proprietary to that vendor who’s incentivized to lock customers into their ecosystem.
Upbound’s approach is different. By building on top of Crossplane, an open-source framework for building control planes, our product gives customers the ability to pick and choose the infrastructure services they want to build their Internal Cloud Platform. For example, we don’t care whether you use GKE, EKS, or AKS for Kubernetes in your organization - but we know you care so we give you a great experience regardless of your choice.
Customization and interoperability are core values of our product. Regardless of the infrastructure customers choose, or the interfaces they expose, Upbound enables organizations to centralize control.
This enables Upbound is to scale with customers as their businesses change and grow. When new infrastructure vendors, regions, or zones are added to your platform, Upbound can easily handle it.
The end result is a total self-serve platform for developers which is production-ready and meets all the security and compliance requirements.
The benefit for operators (e.g.: SREs or DevOps engineers) is that they get a single view of their infrastructure and what's going on within it, whether it’s on-prem, on AWS, GCP Azure, or anywhere else.
Key benefits of Upbound?
- Future-proofed platforms: Never re-platform again. No matter what tools and vendors you add to your infrastructure, Upbound can manage them.
- Faster time to deployment: Applications and new features are shipped faster so businesses can innovate quicker.
- Lower Capex: Cloud computing bills are reduced.
- Lower Opex: Reduced labour costs since SRE doesn’t need to scale as much.
- Reduced risk: Big fixes and governance controlled all in one place.
- Innovate faster: Software engineers can focus on building rather than infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and management.
- Smarter tech stack: Annual vendor negotiation results in more favourable terms for the customer.
- Happier software engineers whose jobs have become more enjoyable result in higher retention and successful hiring.
Features of the Upbound platform
Upbound’s product offerings are available via a subscription model that currently has two tiers.
The first is a free tier catering to individuals getting started with control planes and who need tooling to debug and share their Crossplane providers and configurations. It includes the ability to publish public listings in Upbound Marketplace and trial access to Upbound Cloud.
Upbound’s paid tiers unlock additional value across the product portfolio. Platform teams can manage unlimited control planes in Upbound Cloud or Upbound Self-Hosted, create unlimited private listings in Upbound Marketplace, and get access to 24/7 support, prioritized bug fixes, implementation services, onboarding and training.
Fully managed control planes
Control planes running in Upbound are designed to be high performance, scalable, multi-tenant and secure for the most demanding scenarios.
Upbound Marketplace
Upbound Marketplace is a one-stop shop for all the components you need in your platform powered by an Upbound control plane. Supported and certified listings are available from vendors so you can run your platform in production with confidence.
The Upbound Marketplace has a fully redesigned UI and includes auto-generated documentation for listings which provides customers with examples, efficiency, and ease when building platforms with Upbound. Private listings are also available for Upbound customers, so teams can share custom platform building blocks with their entire organization.
Self-Service Console
Upbound’s Universal Console is dynamically rendered from your Upbound control plane and the Crossplane packages installed in it.
Real-time platform dashboard
View all your platform resources being managed by your control plane in real-time so you can see who’s doing what.
Backups and Restore
Upbound automatically backs up and restores your control planes for your platforms so your customers have continuous platform availability.
Support for Multi-tenancy
Designed for complex multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments, where isolation of cloud credentials, control plane resources, and users is critical.
-
Upbound is the creator and maintainer of the popular open source project Crossplane. We are democratizing the best kept secret in cloud computing — the control plane — giving platform engineers centralized control and developers the freedom of self service.
We have two offerings – Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP) and Upbound.
UXP is Upbound’s downstream distribution of Crossplane, and Official Providers are production ready versions of Providers available exclusively to Upbound customers. Both are maintained, tested, and supported by Upbound on behalf of our customers, and are included with an Upbound subscription.
Upbound is a single, global platform to build, deploy, and operate your own internal developer platforms using managed control planes powered by Crossplane. Want to try Upbound for yourself? Sign up for your 30 day free trial here!
