On June 24, 2020, the Technical Oversight Committee of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the world’s top open source community, TOC has significantly reformed and simplified the Sandbox hierarchy and approved applications for up to 11 CNCF Sandbox projects at a time using a new process. The Kubernetes standard implementation of the Open Application Model (OAM) ** Crossplane project ** is also a member. After deep cooperation with the OAM community, today’s Crossplane is an application and cloud service management and control plane for hybrid cloud scenarios. It is dedicated to the management and delivery of applications based on K8s declarative API and following open application model standards. It abstracts and manages cloud services in a cloud platform-independent and end-user friendly way through a unique mechanism.

  • OAM Kubernetes standard implementation: github.com/crossplane/…
  • Crossplane Project: github.com/crossplane/…

The entry of the Crossplane project into the CNCF Sandbox also means that from today all code, documentation and ownership of the OAM Kubernetes standard implementation will be transferred to the CNCF community for hosting. Complete decoupling with any commercial company behind the project, be it Ali Cloud or Microsoft Cloud. Therefore, as a core dependency to build a highly scalable, standardized Kubernetes application platform, the overall donation of this project to CNCF is an important milestone for the entire cloud ecosystem of platform developers.

The Crossplane project, following the CNCF Sandbox, uses THE OAM as an entry point for its standardized application definition and exposes the platform-independent cloud service definition to users in the form of an OAM Component. So that any program to be run defined by OAM specification, its required operation and maintenance capabilities and dependent cloud services can form a whole to carry out unified delivery and management on different platforms, which really takes the most critical step of undifferentiated cloud application delivery. According to the donation report submitted by Crossplane project to CNCF, so far, the core maintainers of Crossplane project are from three companies, among which three are from Alibaba Cloud, one is from Microsoft Cloud, The rest comes from Crossplane’s original parent company, Upbound. IO.

Currently, maintainers from the three parties are advancing several very important features in the OAM Kubernetes standard implementation:

  1. Standardized definition and management of dependencies between application components and O&M capabilities
  2. Definition and automatic injection of data transfer between application components and o&M capabilities
  3. Versioning definition and management of application components

These features will be available in the next release of The OAM Kubernetes Runtime, enabling platform developers to build their own application management platforms based on the K8s plug-in.

In addition, the same maintainers are also working on the Crossplane project to refactor the code base to ensure that each of the big granular functions such as OAM application definition and management, K8s API composition and abstraction, cloud service infrastructure management, plug-in packaging, etc. is a separate controller. So that you can be very free to install and rely on their own needs.

The Open Application Model project itself, as an international Open source project initiated by Ali Cloud and Microsoft Cloud, has always maintained a high degree of openness and activity in its community, attracting the use, participation and contribution of many top technology companies such as MasterCard, Oracle and The Fourth Paradigm. OAM community has biweekly community meetings (one in the US and one in Beijing) to discuss and make decisions on important issues. Community participants and contributors also synchronize progress and exchange information, and even build traits /Workload realization across companies.

Recommended reading:

  • OAM Founding team: Discover the core principles of OAM Kubernetes implementation

  • Aliyun, together with Microsoft and Crossplane community, released OAM Kubernetes standard implementation and core dependency libraries

If you have any questions:

  • Click to join OAM Project Chinese discussion group
  • Participate directly in the discussion via Gitter
  • OAM open source implementation address

We invite you to join us on July 15

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