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Usage Metering

Upbound Crossplane includes a usage metering system to track resource consumption and operations over time. Usage metering begins when you apply a license.

How usage works​

Usage in Upbound Crossplane is measured on two units:

  • Resources are continuously tracked and reconciled by the control plane, whether they exist inside the cluster or in external systems such as cloud services. These are created, updated, and maintained through compositions and providers to stay aligned with the declared desired state. Resources are measured in resource-hours to account for both breadth and duration.
  • Operations are automation tasks initiated by the control plane to observe, analyze, or change infrastructure or applications beyond standard reconciliation. These include diagnostics, remediation, scheduling, rollouts, optimization, and custom automation tasks driven by agents or functions.

Resources​

Resource represents any discrete infrastructure or application resource actively managed by the control plane. This includes external cloud infrastructure such as databases, IAM roles, and storage buckets, as well as in-cluster objects like Deployments, Ingress, and Services.

A resource is considered "controlled" when it's declared through a composition or directly instantiated by a Crossplane provider, and is being continuously reconciled to match its desired state. This ongoing reconciliation ensures the resource stays compliant, functional, and aligned with its declared specification.

Whether a resource was provisioned via a Crossplane composition, dynamically created by a provider, or derived from a pipeline run, its lifecycle is maintained by the control plane. Resources are metered in resource-hours to account for both breadth and duration.

Operations​

Operations represent discrete units of intelligent automation and orchestration executed by the control plane. These are distinct from the continuous reconciliation that underpins Resources. An operation may involve one-time or recurring tasks that go beyond simple state enforcement. Examples include analyzing logs for anomalies, rolling out software updates in a phased manner, running LLM-powered decision-making, or optimizing infrastructure based on real-time telemetry.

Operations can be triggered by scheduled intervals, events, or intelligent agents, and often encapsulate complex workflows or side effects that span internal and external systems. Their purpose is to extend the power of the control plane from passive reconciliation to proactive management, including diagnosis, remediation, optimization, and change orchestration.

Operations are counted on a per-invocation basis, regardless of how many resources they impact. Each kind: Operation invocation counts as an operation from a metering standpoint.

How metering works​

When UXP has a valid commercial license, a system local to the cluster is responsible for tracking the consumption of resources and operations over time. The system works by periodically counting resources and operations and storing these records as historical data. You can see current usage for an Upbound Crossplane cluster by viewing your license's .status.usage field.

UXP licenses are capacity-based, meaning they define a maximum number of resource-hours and operations respectively. These values are encoded in the license. You can see your license's capacity limit by viewing your license's .status.capacity field.