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Shoulders

Shoulders is a reference implementation of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that demonstrates how to use Crossplane to provide a self-service platform for developers to create and manage cloud-native applications and infrastructure on Kubernetes.

The name originates from "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" by Isaac Newton. Applications on Shoulders run on the shoulders of the maintainers and contributors of all the open-source tools it composes.

What you get​

  • Workspaces — isolated tenant environments with network policies and naming conventions.
  • Web Applications — containerized apps with Deployments, Services and Gateway API routing.
  • Workloads — background workers, one-shot Jobs and CronJobs.
  • State Stores — PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG), Redis and Garage S3 buckets with independent toggles.
  • Event Streams — full Kafka clusters and topics via Strimzi.
  • Observability — LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Prometheus) pre-configured.
  • Security — Kyverno, Trivy Operator, Falco and Policy Reporter.
  • Three interfaces — CLI, Headlamp developer portal, and MCP server for AI assistants.

All resources are Crossplane Composite Resources managed through Flux GitOps.

Start with Quickstart.