SYNTASSO KRATIX ENTERPRISE
AND CROSSPLANE
Crossplane helps platform teams automate cloud resources. SKE turns those resources into self-service platform capabilities complete with governance, approvals, lifecycle management, and operational workflows.
Together, they provide a platform API developers can consume, and platform teams can operate at scale.
Crossplane creates infrastructure resources. Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) creates a platform.
tl;dr:
SKE and Crossplane
In-depth:
Why Crossplane alone isn't enough
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Infrastructure provisioning is only one part of platform capability and service delivery.
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Crossplane is primarily designed for a single control plane, while enterprise platforms typically span multiple clusters and require stronger permission isolation.
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CRDs do not scale indefinitely, making a multi-cluster architecture important as platforms grow.
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Existing infrastructure automation, such as Terraform and direct API integrations, can be expensive and time-consuming to reimplement as Crossplane Providers.
Looking to learn more?
Contact us for more information or to book a demo with a Syntasso solutions architect.
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Crossplane versus Syntasso Kratix Enterprise
Most organisations already have infrastructure automation. Some use Terraform, some use Pulumi, etc. Many use Crossplane to bring Kubernetes-style reconciliation and API-driven management to infrastructure. While this is a powerful approach, organisations often need to invest in new providers, migrate existing automation, and address scaling challenges as platforms grow across teams and clusters.
For many platform teams, however, infrastructure provisioning is only one part of the challenge. The harder problem is composing infrastructure, applications, policies, approvals, and operational workflows into a platform that developers can consume consistently.
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Without a platform orchestration layer, teams often end up with:
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Multiple ways to achieve the same outcome
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Manual approval processes
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Inconsistent governance
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Difficult platform upgrades
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Platform capabilities that only a small number of specialists can maintain
How do Crossplane and
Syntasso Kratix Enterprise compare?
Capability | Crossplane | SKE |
|---|---|---|
Infrastructure provisioning | ✅ | ✅ (via Kratix Destinations) |
Cloud resource lifecycle | ✅ | ✅ (via Kratix Destinations) |
Self-service platform APIs | Limited | ✅ |
Approval workflows | ❌ | ✅ |
Governance orchestration | ❌ | ✅ |
Secure multi-destination delivery | ❌ | ✅ |
Fleet management | Limited | ✅ |
Platform capability lifecycle | ❌ | ✅ |
Infrastructure becomes a
platform capability
A developer requests a PostgreSQL database for a production application.
What happens next?
With Crossplane alone
A platform team has designed and provided templates, compositions, and infrastructure abstractions that developers can consume.
When a request is submitted, Crossplane reconciles the desired state by creating and configuring the infrastructure resources required to run the database.
The result is infrastructure provisioned through a Kubernetes-native control plane.
With SKE and Crossplane
SKE treats PostgreSQL as a platform capability, not just an infrastructure resource.
The capability encapsulates everything required to deliver the service, including infrastructure definitions, dependencies, governance controls, and operational processes.
This means platform teams can define not only what infrastructure should exist, but also how the capability should be delivered and managed throughout its lifecycle.
For every request, SKE will:
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Validate organisational policies
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Trigger approval workflows when required
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Generate the appropriate Crossplane Claims and XRs
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Schedule resources to the correct environments
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Deliver changes through GitOps workflows
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Coordinate deployment across multiple destinations
The platform team defines this behaviour once as part of the capability. All future requests follow the same process automatically.
Crossplane remains responsible for provisioning and reconciling infrastructure. SKE orchestrates the broader platform capability around it.
This separation allows platform teams to evolve infrastructure implementations, governance controls, and operational processes without changing the experience presented to developers.
The benefits of SKE
Replatform without Rebuilding
Most organisations already have years of investment in automation.
Replacing everything is expensive and risky.
SKE creates a platform API across your existing ecosystem.
The result is faster platform adoption, safer migrations, and less disruption for users.
Control without Direct Access
Modern platforms span multiple clusters, environments, cloud accounts, and regions. Rather than assuming you can (or should) reach every cluster under management.
SKE’s scheduling architecture separates placement decisions from delivery mechanisms.
What this enables:
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Air-gapped and disconnected environments
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Multi-cluster and multi-cloud deployments
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Sovereign and regulated infrastructure
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Edge and remote deployments
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Large-scale fleet operations
Manage Platform Capabilities as a Fleet
Provisioning infrastructure is only the first step.
Platform teams also need to:
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Roll out updates in batches
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Coordinate upgrades across environments
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Apply governance controls at speed
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Manage dependencies
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Schedule changes
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Reduce operational risk
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SKE helps platform teams manage capabilities throughout their lifecycle.
FAQ
Q. How do I give developers self-service access to cloud resources without exposing infrastructure complexity?
A. If your goal is to provision and manage cloud infrastructure through Kubernetes, Crossplane is often the right foundation. You can also evaluate other tools in the space, such as Terraform, which has wider adoption and more human-in-the-loop operations. If you also want to provide higher-level platform APIs that represent business capabilities and developer workflows, SKE can naturally build on top of any infrastructure orchestrator to deliver that experience and work natively with Crossplane due to the shared Kubernetes-native architecture.
Q. We already use Crossplane. What problems does SKE solve?
A. Many teams start with Crossplane for infrastructure automation and later need a way to both manage the scale of Crossplane CRD's across clusters and package infrastructure with business processes into reusable platform offerings. SKE has built-in scheduling across clusters, provides an easier on-ramp for creating APIs that aren't part of the public Crossplane/Upbound offerings, and natively enables enterprise-required features such as manual approvals and a coherent experience across infrastructure providers.
Q. How can I standardise platform capabilities across multiple clusters and environments?
A. Crossplane can provision resources in many locations, but does so from a single Kubernetes cluster. Platform teams often need a consistent way to define, distribute, and manage capabilities that span multiple clusters, given the practical limits of CRDs and resources within a single cluster. SKE enables sharding of these resources while maintaining fleet-wide lifecycle management and orchestration for those platform capabilities.
Q. What’s the difference between infrastructure automation and platform engineering?
A. Infrastructure automation focuses on creating and managing resources such as databases, networks, and cloud services. Platform engineering focuses on turning those resources into secure, reusable, self-service capabilities that application teams can consume. Crossplane excels at the former; SKE addresses the latter.
Q. How do I enforce governance, approvals, and operational workflows in a self-service platform?
A. As expectations rise for access to on-demand resources from a platform, teams get pushed beyond infrastructure automation and need to incorporate approvals, compliance controls, dependency management, and operational workflows. SKE adds these capabilities while allowing Crossplane to continue managing the underlying infrastructure.
Q. When should I choose Crossplane alone, and when should I combine it with SKE?
A. If your primary challenge is provisioning and automating infrastructure, and you do not already have a mature Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool in place, Crossplane may be a great option. If you’re building a platform that must expose business capabilities, manage dependencies, support governance processes, or operate consistently across multiple environments, SKE can complement Crossplane by providing those higher-level platform management capabilities. SKE can also provide you with the Crossplane-like experience in other IaC tools by enabling reconciliation and API requests.
The bottom line...
Crossplane is an excellent Kubernetes-native infrastructure orchestrator.
SKE is a scalable multi-platform orchestration framework.
Use Crossplane to create resources. Use SKE to turn those resources into a platform.