In this blog rather than going into details and thearotical part about crossplane , will look how to start with crossplane and cretae infrastructure with the help of it. The very first step we need to do is to install crossplane to use it.

Installation of Crossplane

Let’s take a look at how Crossplane allows us to provision cloud resources. We are creating resources on the cloud AWS.

Prerequisites

• Get a Kubernetes Cluster or Kind Cluster or Minikube v0.28+
• Helm, minimum version v3.0.0+.

Once you have created your k8 cluster or minikube one. Install crossplane on the cluster with the help of below commands

Installing Crossplane

Use Helm 3 to install the latest official stable release of Crossplane.

# kubectl create namespace crossplane

# helm repo add crossplane-stable https://charts.crossplane.io/stable

# helm repo update

# helm install crossplane --namespace crossplane crossplane-stable/crossplane

Check Crossplane Status.

# helm list -n crossplane

# kubectl get all -n crossplane

Use the following command to install crossplane CLI

# curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crossplane/crossplane/release-1.5/install.sh | sh

Move executable to path /usr/local/bin

# mv kubectl-crossplane /usr/local/bin

Verify the installation.

# kubectl-crossplane --version

Once the Crossplane is installed successfully on cluster, and created a crossplane namespace. Let install the provider now which you wanted . I am installing AWS provider with the help of below manifest file.

aws-provider.yaml
--------------------------------------------------------
apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: aws-provider
spec:
  package: crossplane/provider-aws:alpha

kubectl apply -f aws-provider.yaml 

Execute the command : kubectl apply -f aws-provider.yaml you will get below output

knoldus@INL-F9ZYN93:~/crossplane-aws$ kubectl apply -f aws-provider.yaml 
provider.pkg.crossplane.io/aws-provider created

###Once you install the Provider, wait for the Provider to be healthy by executing kubectl get provider.pkg

knoldus@INL-F9ZYN93:~/crossplane-aws$ kubectl get provider.pkg
NAME           INSTALLED   HEALTHY   PACKAGE                         AGE
aws-provider   True        True     crossplane/provider-aws:alpha   5m25s

Once the Provider is healthy let us now configure the Provider to communicate with AWS by creating a ProviderConfig definition. Make sure that you have already configured your credentials using AWS configure

###Generate the configuration files with the AWS Credentials. 
AWS_PROFILE=default && echo -e "[default]\naws_access_key_id = $(aws configure get aws_access_key_id --profile $AWS_PROFILE)\naws_secret_access_key = $(aws configure get aws_secret_access_key --profile $AWS_PROFILE)" > creds.conf
###Create a Kubernetes secret with the configuration file generated. 
kubectl create secret generic aws-secret-creds -n crossplane-system --from-file=creds=./creds.conf
###Once the secret is created let us now create the Provider config for our AWS account.
kubectl apply -f provider-config.yaml 

apiVersion: aws.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: ProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: awsconfig
spec:
  credentials:
    source: Secret
    secretRef:
      namespace: crossplane
      name: aws-secret-creds
      key: creds

Upon successful creation, your local cluster should now be able to communicate with AWS.

Now lets create VPC , Subnet and route table on AWS

1. Let us create a VPC in the us-east-1 region with the below-mentioned spec.

apiVersion: ec2.aws.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: VPC
metadata:
  name: production-vpc
spec:
  forProvider:
    region: us-east-1
    cidrBlock: 192.168.0.0/16
    enableDnsSupport: true
    enableDnsHostNames: true
    tags:
    - key: Environment
      value: Production
    - key: Owner
      value: Sakshi
    - key: Name
      value: production-vpc
    instanceTenancy: default
  providerConfigRef:
    name: awsconfig

kubectl apply -f aws-vpc.yaml 
###Let us check the status of the VPC 
kubectl get vpc

knoldus@INL-F9ZYN93:~/crossplane-aws$ kubectl get vpc
NAME                    READY    SYNCED     ID                                                CIDR                         AGE
production-vpc    True          true             vpc-004c2d1ba7394b3d6     192.168.0.0/16        46s

2. Once our VPC is successfully created let us create 2 subnets

apiVersion: ec2.aws.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: Subnet
metadata:
  name: prod-subnet-1
spec:
  forProvider:
    region: us-east-1
    availabilityZone: us-east-1a
    cidrBlock: 192.168.1.0/24
    vpcIdRef:
      name: production-vpc
    tags:
    - key: Environment
      value: Production
    - key: Name
      value: prod-subnet-1
    - key: Owner
      value: Sakshi
    mapPublicIPOnLaunch: true
  providerConfigRef:
    name: awsconfig

---

apiVersion: ec2.aws.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: Subnet
metadata:
  name: prod-subnet-2
spec:
  forProvider:
    region: us-east-1
    availabilityZone: us-east-1b
    cidrBlock: 192.168.2.0/24
    vpcIdRef:
      name: production-vpc
    tags:
    - key: Environment
      value: Production
    - key: Name
      value: prod-subnet-2
    - key: Owner
      value: Sakshi
    mapPublicIPOnLaunch: true
  providerConfigRef:
    name: awsconfig

kubectl apply -f aws-subnet.yaml
###Let us check the status of the subnets.
kubectl get subnets

3. Let us now create the corresponding Internet gateway and Route table.

apiVersion: ec2.aws.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: InternetGateway
metadata:
  name: production-internetgateway
spec:
  forProvider:
    region: us-east-1
    vpcIdRef:
      name: production-vpc
  providerConfigRef:
    name: awsconfig

--- 


apiVersion: ec2.aws.crossplane.io/v1alpha4
kind: RouteTable
metadata:
  name: production-routetable
spec:
  forProvider:
    region: us-east-1
    routes:
      - destinationCidrBlock: 0.0.0.0/0
        gatewayIdRef:
          name: production-internetgateway
    associations:
      - subnetIdRef:
          name: prod-subnet-2
      - subnetIdRef:
          name: prod-subnet-1
    vpcIdRef:
      name: production-vpc
  providerConfigRef:
    name: awsconfig

kubectl apply -f aws-igwrt.yaml
###Let us check the status of the Route table and Internet Gateway
kubectl get InternetGateway,RouteTable

In this way you can create the infrastructure using crossplane. You can create many more resources you required . I just shown some of the example.
For the reference you can refer https://docs.crossplane.io/v1.13/getting-started/provider-aws/