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

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

A principal engineer at UISpare describes how they built 'Fleet Commander', a decentralized control plane for service orchestration. The system replaces fragmented UI portals with a code-first approach using Kubernetes and Crossplane. It consists of a central 'commander' exposing a public API and independent 'units' (technology-specific control planes) owned by infrastructure teams. Crossplane compositions allow teams to define opinionated, simplified resource APIs. The Kubernetes API itself serves as the integration layer between commander and units, enabling reconciliation-based automation. Challenges include cross-unit data exchange (solved via a provider-exchange pattern), dependency version management across Crossplane upgrades, and the steep learning curve requiring teams to master Kubernetes, Crossplane, and Go.

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