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AI-powered Intelligent Control Planes

Upbound Crossplane supports running Intelligent Control Planes, which are a class of composition functions and operation functions that bring LLM-driven logic into your control plane's reconcile loop.

Intelligent Control Planes extend the traditional observe → compare → act pattern to observe → analyze → act → adapt cycles that incorporate AI-driven reasoning capabilities. The analyze phase introduces decision making that can balance competing objectives, understand business context, and optimize based on complex

patterns that deterministic logic can't easily capture. The adapt phase enables

learning from operational outcomes to improve future decision-making processes.

Intelligent compositions

When you incorporate a composition function having AI intelligence to a composition pipeline, it's considered an intelligent composition. Some examples of these functions are:

These functions pass pipeline context to a Large Language Model like Claude. They use user-specified prompts to guide Claude in configuring function pipeline resources. MCP servers are packaged as Add-Ons and install on your control plane. They deliver tools that the language model can use.

Intelligent operations

When you incorporate an operation function having AI intelligence to an operation pipeline, it's considered an intelligent operation. Some examples of these functions are:

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting LLMs to systems where data lives. Upbound Crossplane supports the installation of MCP servers, packaged as Add-Ons. Some examples are:

Learn about how to package an MCP server into an Add-On in the concept documentation.

Next steps

Learn about example use cases of Intelligent Control Planes by reading the guides