Crossplane

Run Hello Pico on Kubernetes with Crossplane.

Welcome to Crossplane, the second course of the Open Engineering Academy. This course teaches how to compose the reusable Hello Pico artifact from the Pico course so it can run on a local Kubernetes cluster, using Crossplane as the control-plane building block.

Where this course fits

Crossplane is the academy’s composition layer. The three-layer story is:

Crossplane composes, Sandcastle constructs, Picos behave.

This course teaches how Crossplane declares and composes what should exist — turning a request for a hello-world-pico into the concrete Kubernetes resources needed to run it. Its sibling courses teach the other two layers:

  • Pico course — the runtime/behaviour layer: what the resulting Pico artifact actually does.
  • Sandcastle course — the construction layer: how the durable artifacts a Crossplane composition needs are safely built inside a bounded engineering environment.

What you will learn

By the end of the course you will be able to:

  • Describe what Crossplane provides on top of Kubernetes.
  • Explain how a Pico maps to Crossplane compositions and managed resources.
  • Compose a hello-world-pico deployment for a local Kubernetes cluster (minikube) and verify it end-to-end in the Crossplane lab.

See the course descriptor in metadata.yaml for the machine-readable summary (id, level, duration, prerequisites, teaches, produces).

Prerequisites

  • Completion of the Pico course, or equivalent familiarity with Rules, the Parser, and the Composer.
  • Working shell (bash or zsh), a text editor, and Docker.
  • A local Kubernetes environment. Local minikube is the reference environment used by the accompanying lab; see the Kubernetes course setup foundation for the canonical install, PATH checks, and first cluster bring-up.

How this course is structured

The course follows the shared academy course structure — parts, lessons, and per-lesson index / exercise / lab / summary / quiz pages:

courses/crossplane/
  _quarto.yml          # this course website
  index.qmd            # you are here
  metadata.yaml        # machine-readable course descriptor
  glossary.qmd         # course glossary
  part-1/              # section
    index.qmd
    <lesson>/          # lesson (authored by the learner-path task)
  part-2/
  part-3/
  labs/                # course-scoped labs

Start here

NoteCourse status

This course is the initial Crossplane milestone. Part 1 is complete — its lesson and the accompanying runnable Hello Pico on Kubernetes lab are both published. Parts 2 and 3 are intentionally scaffolded and are clearly labelled where learner-visible.