Odyssey Platform # 02

Another exciting week in the Platform Engineering ecosystem!

Author

Farooq Kadri
May 20, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 

Editor's Note
Welcome to the second edition of Odyssey Platform Weekly! This week, we’re diving into fresh insights, key events, and powerful stories shaping the future of platform engineering.

🗞️ In this newsletter

🗓️ Events

🔦 Tool Spotlight

  • Crossplane + GitOps: Declare your cloud in Git, and let Kubernetes keep it in sync.

🔍️ Deep Dive

  • Crossplane Architecture Simplified

🎯 Stay Inspired - Case Studies

👀 In Case you missed it

  • Latest news in the platform engineering domain

📆 Upcoming Events

🚀 Developer Experience Summit 2025
📅 May 21, 2025 – Virtual
Join leaders from LinkedIn, GitHub, and Atlassian as they explore how AI and platform engineering are reshaping DevEx. From IDPs to cognitive load reduction, this summit is packed with insights for platform teams driving next-gen developer productivity.
👉 Register here

🔦 Tool Spotlight

Crossplane + GitOps: Declare your cloud in Git, and let Kubernetes keep it in sync.

🔧 Crossplane is a powerful open-source control plane that turns your Kubernetes cluster into a universal infrastructure orchestrator using declarative APIs.

🎙️ Join us for a LinkedIn Live deep dive + AMA where we simplify Crossplane's architecture and walk through how its core components work together.

🧠 Crossplane Architecture Simplified

Crossplane is more than just an alternative to Terraform — it’s a Kubernetes-native control plane that enables platform teams to build internal cloud platforms declaratively using custom resources and compositions.

This edition breaks down how the key components of Crossplane work together to provision infrastructure and expose self-service APIs to developers.

🔌 From Cloud APIs to Compositions – Who Builds What?

Above visual shows how Crossplane decouples responsibilities:

  • Platform Builders define reusable building blocks using Providers, XRDs, and Compositions.

  • Developers consume these abstractions via simple claims — without needing to know which cloud APIs are under the hood.
    Crossplane becomes the contract between infra complexity and developer simplicity.

⚙️ How a Claim Triggers Infrastructure in Kubernetes

When a developer submits a claim (like kubectl apply -f claim.yaml), Crossplane kicks off a powerful reconciliation workflow:

  • It matches the claim to a Composite Resource Definition (XRD)

  • Binds it to a Composition

  • And provisions actual cloud resources using Providers
    This diagram shows the lifecycle of a claim, and how everything from CRDs to managed resources is stitched together — all declaratively.

🎯 Stay Inspired - Case Studies

  • Strategic builder: Financial institution

    A global financial institution transformed its platform approach by standardizing golden paths and introducing platform abstraction layers. This enabled faster developer onboarding, reduced infrastructure complexity, and improved governance.
    With a strong platform engineering practice, teams shifted from being infrastructure builders to strategic accelerators of innovation.

👀 In Case You Missed It…

  • Kosli’s funding

    “Kosli Raises $10 Million from Deutsche Bank and Heavybit…”

    (Note: while this is Kosli’s funding, Massdriver hasn’t announced a $10 M round recently—latest public is $8 M in Aug 2023.)

  • Pulumi launches Pulumi IDP
    IaC leader Pulumi unveiled Pulumi IDP, an opinionated internal developer platform with security & governance-by‑design to accelerate cloud infrastructure delivery

  • Microsoft forms CoreAI – Platform & Tools
    Microsoft combined Dev Div and AI platform teams under Jay Parikh (ex‑Meta) to build an “AI‑first app stack” on Azure—aiming to compress decades of app innovation into three years.

Till next time,