The Revival of the Crossplane Provider for OVH: A Community Story

Introduction

Two years ago, I started a simple yet ambitious mission: to offer OVHcloud users a Kubernetes-native way to manage their cloud resources through Crossplane. Today, I am proud to announce that the Crossplane provider for OVH has been reborn—more complete, more stable, and supported by an engaged community.

This story is both a personal retrospective and an official announcement: the provider is now fully maintained again, with more than 135 cluster-scoped and namespaced resources, covering almost the entire OVH Terraform provider surface, and fully compatible with Crossplane 1.x and 2.x.

The Beginning: Why create this provider?

At the time, there was a gap: no official or community Crossplane provider existed for OVHcloud.

Crossplane was just starting to emerge as a pillar of modern Platform Engineering — a way to expose cloud resources through the Kubernetes API. Even though few teams were using it (5 to 10%), those who believed in it clearly understood its power.

I wanted to give them an alternative.

So I developed the first Crossplane provider for OVH, with the goal of:

• managing OVH the same way we manage GCP or AWS, through CRDs;
• applying GitOps to cloud provisioning;
• unifying multicloud management through the Kubernetes API;
• helping platform teams build modern self-service platforms.

Sharing the Vision

I presented the provider to Aurélie Vache, who was extremely enthusiastic, kind, and supportive.

But OVHcloud's position was clear

Community providers cannot be considered official providers.

This is understandable: it requires resources, support, and long-term commitment.

I even offered to donate the provider to OVH, so that it could be maintained internally and kept in sync with the Terraform provider.

No answer.

Combined with a huge amount of work in my professional life, I had to put the project on pause.

For almost a year, the provider stayed dormant.

The Turning Point: When the community gets involved

One day, I was contacted by Nicolas, Kevin, and Ferréol from Theseus.

They told me something unexpected:

They were using the provider in production to deliver a Database-as-a-Service offering for the French government.

We exchanged ideas, discussed, and shared our visions.

They were very satisfied with the provider.

They even tried to convince OVH to maintain it.

OVH’s response:

“We do not have the resources. The majority of our clients use Terraform.”

As a Platform Engineer, this was difficult to understand. Crossplane is not just another IaC tool.

It is the API of the modern cloud.

But that conversation gave me something essential:

motivation !

The Spark: an unexpected Pull Request

A few weeks later, I came across a commit from Fabien :

A PR to update the provider to Crossplane 2.0.

That was the trigger.

I told myself:

“This is community work. People depend on it. It would be unfair to let innovation die.”

So I came back.

I put the project back in order.

Updated the resources.

Ensured full compatibility.

Cleaned the codebase.

Added advanced tests.

The provider was reborn with version v2.9.0 (Release Note).

The Revival: A team of maintainers

Open-source is never a solo project.

I am very happy that Endre Karlson ​ Alegrowin joined the project as maintainers.

We committed to turning this provider into something:

• stable
• active
• evolving
• aligned with Terraform and upcoming OVH APIs

Today, we support:

• 135+ OVH resources
• more than 90% of the Terraform provider
• Crossplane 1.x and 2.x
• a growing roadmap

The community brought the provider back to life.

Why it matters

Crossplane is transforming how cloud platforms are designed. The OVH ecosystem also deserves:

• a declarative approach
• GitOps-driven management
• a Kubernetes API for provisioning
• a unified multi-cloud standard

This provider opens that path.

Not because the vendor wanted it, but because the community chose it.

What’s Next

We are already working on:

• enriched documentation
• real examples
• support for upcoming Terraform API changes
• adding missing services
• advanced automated tests
• real-world use cases for internal platforms

Contributions and feedback are welcome.

Open-source moves forward thanks to those who get involved.

Conclusion

This journey taught me something fundamental:

When a cloud provider does not deliver innovation, the community builds it.

Thank you to everyone who supported, used, contributed to, or simply believed in this provider.

For teams building platforms, government services, SaaS products, or modern infrastructures:

the Crossplane OVH provider is here—alive, robust, and maintained.

Let’s keep pushing the open-source ecosystem forward.