Infrastructure as Code has historically been Terraform, but now there's a new player in town that aims to simplify resource provisioning. Crossplane combines IaC and GitOps, enabling YAML-based definitions for your entire infrastructure. In this session, we will explore what Crossplane is, how it works under the hood, and why it has become one of the fastest-growing CNCF projects. We'll examine its role in platform engineering, its integration with public cloud providers, and the problems it aims to solve compared with traditional IaC tools.

To demonstrate these concepts in practice, we will build and deploy a modern application comprising a React frontend, a Java backend, and an Oracle Database in a dynamically provisioned Crossplane environment. Using a blue-green deployment strategy, we'll demonstrate how to manage infrastructure and application delivery together to enable safe, gradual releases.