I wonder what this means for projects like https://crossplane.io/, it's a tool that lets you provision cloud resources with Kubernetes manifests. I guess this cluster API project is maybe something Crossplane would use under the hood?

I haven't used Crossplate yet but I like the idea around it and could see things moving into this direction over time. Mainly because:

I use Terraform now to set up cloud resources and ArgoCD to control what runs in the cluster but there's pain points in having things exist in both worlds as dependencies. Like if I want to Helm install the AWS Load Balancer controller into my cluster using ArgoCD it requires having a few IAM policies created by Terraform beforehand and if you use something like EKS Fargate it also means your load balancer controller needs to know your VPC ID at install time which is something only Terraform knows about since it created the VPC.

So now you end up writing glue code to extract outputs from Terraform and use sed to replace them into Kubernetes YAML files. Another example would be having access to useful Kubernetes add-ons like External DNS to update public DNS records automatically but you still need to create your AWS Hosted Zone with Terraform beforehand for new domains.

It would be way cleaner and nicer if everything was provisioned by the same tool. I know Terraform can Helm install things but I don't like this pattern where a tool that's dedicated to setting up my cloud infrastructure is now responsible for application level things. It would be like trying to use Terraform to replace Ansible, it just doesn't feel like the right tool for the job.

But a unified tool that is a reconciliation master through Kubernetes seems like a no brainer evolution in how we deal with IaC. Not just to keep things in the same universe but applying changes and drift detection.