DEVOPSdigest

Upbound announced significant advancements to its platform, targeting enterprises building self-service cloud environments for their developers and machine learning engineers.

Based on open-source software Kubernetes and Crossplane, Upbound’s new enhancements simplify cloud service customization, providing flexibility to meet unique requirements and reducing barriers to cloud adoption. These capabilities address companies' needs to provide personalized cloud infrastructure while improving efficiency by eliminating problems with configuration drift.

“We have two primary objectives with this release: to help our customers realize their goal of creating a singular cloud experience for their end users and to make it easier for them to do so,” said Bassam Tabbara, CEO and Founder of Upbound. “Our vision is for a customer to be able to test their cloud platform in 10 minutes and deploy to production in a day.”

Upbound’s platform enables businesses to consolidate cloud service offerings into intuitive, self-service portals, allowing developers and AI teams to build with greater agility. These tools decrease dependency on engineering resources and unlock the potential for scalable revenue growth by delivering faster, more adaptable cloud solutions.

Upbound’s latest release introduces essential tools that enhance platform engineering and accelerate the roll-out of cloud platforms:

- VSCode Support: This aids in building complex cloud service compositions by improving developer productivity through code completion, schema validation, and linting with Crossplane providers.

- Developer Control Planes: Lightweight, testing-focused control planes managed in the Upbound platform for real-time debugging and service validation, further accelerating deployment of cloud customizations.

These tools provide an intuitive project-based software development lifecycle (SDLC) for Crossplane compositions, making them easy to learn and build. This allows engineers to easily customize cloud infrastructure in a way that provides continuous reconciliation, speeding up both deployment and ongoing operations.

With the introduction of user portals and APIs for cloud resource provisioning, Upbound enhances end-user accessibility with self-service functionality. Platform engineers can now empower end-users such as developers and machine learning engineers to manage custom cloud resources on demand, speeding up provisioning from days to minutes and reducing administrative overhead.

Security remains at the forefront of Upbound’s offerings. The Upbound Official Packages program now includes security-enhanced packages with signed versions, distroless images, and Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), reflecting Upbound’s commitment to enterprise-grade security standards. Upbound has also released new core platform capabilities that increase the efficiency of serving thousands of end-users and cloud services, including a query API for viewing data across cloud services and a telemetry collector for improving observability of metrics and logs.

As part of this release, Upbound has introduced new, flexible pricing tiers: a free Individual Plan for solo users and a low-cost Team Plan for small-scale projects and pilots. These provide accessible entry points for platform engineers and their teams to experience the platform before scaling.

With these latest developments, Upbound aims to provide a cloud management platform that's flexible enough to meet enterprises' unique and evolving needs, with the core services needed for governance to ensure security, compliance, and cost control. Upbound’s comprehensive approach empowers companies to innovate freely, securely, and at a competitive pace—driving value for customers, investors, and the industry at large.

These new features have been released and are generally available in the Upbound platform.