Crossplane v2.5 Release Marks End-of-Life for v1.20, Reinforcing Control Plane Evolution

Crossplane has officially released version 2.5 today, a significant milestone that also marks the end-of-life (EOL) for Crossplane v1.20. This release continues Crossplane's quarterly cadence, emphasizing stability, new features, and the deprecation of older versions to encourage adoption of the latest advancements. The EOL of v1.20 means that this version will no longer receive support or maintenance from the Crossplane project, necessitating an upgrade path for any organizations still utilizing it in their infrastructure. This development is particularly important for platform teams and SREs who have built internal developer platforms (IDPs) and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions on Crossplane. The continuous evolution of Crossplane, particularly with the architectural shifts introduced in the v2 series, aims to provide more capable, reliable, and observable control planes. The move to v2.x, which began with v2.0 in August 2025, brought about major changes such as namespaced composite and managed resources, and the introduction of Composition Functions for more dynamic resource generation. These features enhance multi-tenancy, simplify RBAC, and move beyond static YAML configurations, offering greater flexibility and power to platform builders. The broader trend in cloud-native development points towards Kubernetes becoming the universal control plane for managing not just applications, but also the underlying infrastructure. Crossplane is at the forefront of this movement, allowing organizations to define and manage cloud resources as Kubernetes-native objects. This approach enables GitOps workflows for infrastructure, continuous drift detection, and automated reconciliation, aligning infrastructure management with application deployment practices. The project's graduation to a CNCF top-level project in November 2025 further solidified its position as a mature and widely adopted solution for platform engineering. For practitioners, the immediate implication is the need to plan and execute an upgrade strategy from v1.20 to a supported v2.x release. This transition is not merely a version bump but an opportunity to leverage the enhanced capabilities of Crossplane v2, including improved debugging with the pipeline inspector (introduced in v2.2) and more flexible composition functions. Teams should review their existing compositions and providers, especially considering the changes in namespacing and the deprecation of claims in favor of direct XR requests in new setups. Adopting v2.5 will ensure access to ongoing security updates, performance improvements, and the expanding ecosystem of Crossplane providers and configurations, ultimately leading to more robust and scalable internal platforms. Ignoring this upgrade could lead to unsupported deployments and potential security vulnerabilities.