At Julius Baer we are building an internal platform to support dozens of DevOps teams in delivering and operating hundreds of applications.
With different product teams delivering their own offerings like, but not limited to, CI/CD, data streaming, or public cloud services, we hit a crossroad: how are we going to enable access to those platform capabilities in an easy and consistent way, while at the same time promote methodologies like GitOps and Infrastructure as Code.

Traditionally, each team would build their own automation in a vacuum, leaving to someone else integrating it and providing a simple interface to users, likely in the form of an ordering portal.

Instead, let us walk you through the journey where organizational models and technology shape each other, resulting in us adopting a decentralized Crossplane setup to keep automation responsibilities close to the product teams while at the same time enabling a consistent public API governed by a central authority, effectively a Service Catalog built upon Kubernetes’ Custom Resource Definitions.

Devoxx

Engineers at Julius Baer built a decentralized control plane called Fleet Commander to orchestrate infrastructure and services across a large bank. The system uses Kubernetes and Crossplane to create a commander-unit architecture where a central commander exposes a public API via Git, and independent units handle provisioning of specific resources (databases, Kafka, Kubernetes clusters, etc.). Infrastructure teams own their end-to-end service delivery by writing public Crossplane compositions, while a design authority ensures API consistency. The talk covers the architecture, the Go-based framework provided to unit teams, and three key challenges: inter-unit dependencies (solved via data contracts through the commander), lifecycle/version management across decentralized clusters, and the steep onboarding curve requiring Kubernetes, Crossplane, and Go knowledge.

Break the silo: How we built a decentralized control plane for service orchestration by E. Taborelli