SAN MATEO, Calif., Aug. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Upbound, the company behind Crossplane, today announced Upbound V3, a major expansion of its infrastructure platform designed to give enterprises a unified way to operate and govern cloud and AI infrastructure across clouds, data centers and teams.
Enterprise infrastructure is increasingly fragmented across business units, clouds, on-premises environments and the tools individual teams have adopted. Each control plane manages its own part of that infrastructure, but organizations often lack a unified way to see what is running, understand its state and consistently govern who or what can make changes.
That challenge is becoming more urgent as AI agents begin operating infrastructure alongside engineers. Human operators can bridge gaps between Git, cloud consoles, pipelines and internal documentation using experience and judgment. AI agents need infrastructure state, permissions and governance available programmatically and consistently.
Upbound V3 addresses that problem by bringing an organization’s control planes together into a single platform, providing fleet-wide visibility, a unified API and centralized governance. Engineers, automation and AI agents can operate through the same system and under the same policies, regardless of where individual control planes are deployed.
“AI is changing not only how software gets built, but who operates the infrastructure underneath it,” said Bassam Tabbara, CEO and Founder of Upbound. “Platform teams need a way to give engineers and AI agents access to infrastructure without creating another layer of fragmented tooling or sacrificing governance. Upbound V3 gives them one platform for operating their entire control plane fleet, whether the work is being done by a person, a pipeline or an agent.”
“AI is changing the demands placed on enterprise infrastructure and the teams responsible for operating and managing it,” said Matthew Flug, Research Manager, Intelligent Application Modernization and Deployment Platforms, IDC. “As organizations introduce AI agents into infrastructure operations, having consistent visibility, access controls and governance across environments is becoming increasingly important.”
Upbound’s approach builds on Crossplane, the open source control plane framework created by Upbound. Crossplane became a CNCF Graduated project in 2025 and has surpassed 100 million downloads, with production adoption at more than 1,000 organizations.
One Platform Across Every Control Plane
Upbound V3 introduces a common way for people, software and AI agents to interact with infrastructure while maintaining the same underlying view and governance model.
- Hub provides a unified API across an organization’s control plane fleet. It indexes resources across connected control planes so platform teams, developer portals, compliance systems and AI agents can query what exists and understand its state without connecting to each control plane individually.
- Console provides a unified web interface for interacting with Upbound products and control planes, giving human operators a single place to view and manage infrastructure.
One Governed Fleet for Humans and AI Agents
Upbound V3 introduces a unified identity and access model across the control plane fleet, with single sign-on, fleet-wide role-based permissions and centrally managed credentials.
The same governance applies whether an infrastructure request comes from an engineer or an AI agent. AI systems can be authenticated, scoped to specific permissions and audited, with policy enforced where infrastructure changes occur. This allows organizations to introduce AI agents without creating a separate governance model.
Fleet-Wide Infrastructure Insights
Upbound Insights, new in V3, gives platform teams a live view across their infrastructure estate, including resources managed by Upbound Control Plane and the Kubernetes clusters beneath them. Teams can search and investigate infrastructure from a single view rather than connecting to individual control planes or scripting across environments.
Upbound Control Plane remains the company’s core product for operating and governing control planes. V3 adds cross-region disaster recovery and scheduled disaster recovery exercises per control plane.
Secure Software Supply Chain
Marketplace now provides per-version CVE summaries and downloadable SBOMs before installation, plus a private registry for internal packages. Official and partner images are signed and delivered as SLSA Level 2 images with backported security patches and defined support windows.
Cloud, On Premises and Air-Gapped
V3 extends self-hosting across the platform, including Console, and supports fully air-gapped deployments. Organizations can use the same capabilities and governance across cloud, on-premises and isolated environments.
Together, these capabilities advance Upbound’s vision of one infrastructure platform with consistent visibility and governance for engineers, automation and AI agents.
Availability
Upbound V3 is available today.
Resources
- Blog: Upbound V3, One View API and Governance Model for Every Control Plane You Run
- Blog: Upbound Insights told us 230 resources were broken. Hub told us why.
About Upbound
Upbound is pioneering infrastructure platforms for the agentic AI era, serving Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers across more than 100 countries. The company empowers infrastructure and platform teams with intelligent control planes, based on Kubernetes and Crossplane, that provision, operate, and adapt so platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents. Upbound is the creator and primary maintainer of Crossplane, the popular open-source framework for building cloud-native control planes, with over 100 million downloads and adoption by more than 1,000 organizations in production worldwide. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Mateo, CA, a Series B startup backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, Upbound has raised $69M to date. For more information, visit www.upbound.io.
Press Contact upbound@orogroup.com
