openova/platform/crossplane

Crossplane

Day-2 cloud resource provisioning for Catalyst. Per-Sovereign on the management cluster (see docs/PLATFORM-TECH-STACK.md §3.2) — manages all non-Kubernetes resources for the entire Sovereign (host clusters, VPCs, DNS records, S3 buckets, third-party SaaS).

Crossplane is platform plumbing, never a user-facing surface. Users see "needs a database, pick existing or new" in the Catalyst console; Blueprint authors write Compositions; advanced users (sovereign-admins, OpenOva engineers) contribute Compositions upstream as Blueprints. End users do NOT write Crossplane Compositions in their Application configs. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md §4 / §7 (the "no fourth surface" rule) and docs/BLUEPRINT-AUTHORING.md §8.

Status: Accepted | Updated: 2026-04-27

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Overview

Crossplane provides Kubernetes-native cloud resource provisioning for day-2 operations. Terraform handles initial bootstrap; Crossplane manages ongoing infrastructure.

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Architecture

flowchart TB
    subgraph K8s["Kubernetes"]
        subgraph Crossplane
            Controller[Crossplane Controller]
            Provider[Cloud Provider]
        end

        XR[Composite Resources]
        Claim[Claims]
    end

    subgraph Cloud["Cloud Provider"]
        Resources[Cloud Resources]
    end

    Claim --> XR
    XR --> Controller
    Controller --> Provider
    Provider --> Resources

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OpenTofu vs Crossplane

Catalyst uses OpenTofu (the open-source Terraform fork) for bootstrap IaC, not Terraform. See docs/PLATFORM-TECH-STACK.md §3.2 and platform/opentofu/.

Aspect	OpenTofu	Crossplane
Phase	Bootstrap (day-0/1) — Phase 0 of Sovereign provisioning, then archived	Day-2+ operations
State	External state file	Kubernetes CRDs
Drift	Manual detection	Continuous reconciliation
Access	CI/CD pipeline (catalyst-provisioner)	K8s RBAC
Lifecycle	Point-in-time	GitOps continuous

Decision: Use OpenTofu for initial cluster bootstrap only (Phase 0). All subsequent infrastructure managed via Crossplane.

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Supported Providers

Provider	Status	Crossplane Provider
Hetzner Cloud	Available	hcloud
Huawei Cloud	Coming	huaweicloud
Oracle Cloud	Coming	oci
AWS	Coming	aws
GCP	Coming	gcp
Azure	Coming	azure

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Configuration

Provider Configuration

apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: provider-hcloud
spec:
  package: xpkg.upbound.io/crossplane-contrib/provider-hcloud:v0.4.0
---
apiVersion: hcloud.crossplane.io/v1alpha1
kind: ProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  credentials:
    source: Secret
    secretRef:
      namespace: crossplane-system
      name: hcloud-credentials
      key: token

Composite Resource Definition

apiVersion: apiextensions.crossplane.io/v1
kind: CompositeResourceDefinition
metadata:
  name: xdatabases.compose.openova.io
spec:
  group: compose.openova.io                      # canonical XRD group per BLUEPRINT-AUTHORING §8
  names:
    kind: XDatabase
    plural: xdatabases
  versions:
    - name: v1alpha1
      served: true
      referenceable: true
      schema:
        openAPIV3Schema:
          type: object
          properties:
            spec:
              type: object
              properties:
                size:
                  type: string
                  enum: [small, medium, large]

Composition

apiVersion: apiextensions.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Composition
metadata:
  name: database.hcloud.compose.openova.io
spec:
  compositeTypeRef:
    apiVersion: compose.openova.io/v1alpha1     # canonical XRD group per BLUEPRINT-AUTHORING §8
    kind: XDatabase
  resources:
    - name: server
      base:
        apiVersion: hcloud.crossplane.io/v1alpha1
        kind: Server
        spec:
          forProvider:
            serverType: cx21
            image: ubuntu-22.04

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GitOps Integration

Crossplane resources are managed via Flux:

apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: Kustomization
metadata:
  name: crossplane
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 10m
  sourceRef:
    kind: GitRepository
    name: crossplane
  path: ./deploy/prod
  prune: true

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Catalyst Integration

Crossplane Compositions are referenced by Blueprints when an Application requires non-Kubernetes resources (cloud DBs, DNS records, S3 buckets, etc.). End users never see Crossplane directly — they see "needs a database" in the Blueprint's configSchema, rendered as a form in the Catalyst console. Advanced users author Crossplane Compositions and contribute them upstream as Blueprints. See docs/BLUEPRINT-AUTHORING.md §8.

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Part of OpenOva