Building platforms using kro for composition

The rise of Kubernetes-native composition Where kro fits in platform design Where platforms need more than kro Looking ahead at a growing ecosystem Posted on December 15, 2025 by Abby Bangser, CNCF Ambassador CNCF projects highlighted in this post Recent industry developments, such as Amazon’s announcement of the new EKS capabilities, highlight a trend toward supporting platforms with managed GitOps, cloud resource operators, and composition tooling. In particular, the involvement of Kube Resource Orchestrator (kro) —a young, cross-cloud initiative—reflects growing ecosystem interest in simplifying Kubernetes-native resource grouping. Its inclusion in the capabilities package signals that major cloud providers recognize the value of the SIG Cloud Provider –maintained project and its potential role in future platform-engineering workflows. This is a win for platform engineers. The composition of Kubernetes resources is becoming increasingly important as declarative Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tooling expands the number of objects we manage. For example, CNCF graduated project Crossplane , and the cloud-specific alternatives, such as AWS Controller for Kubernetes (ACK), which is packaged with EKS Capabilities both can add hundreds or even thousands of new CRDs to a cluster. With composition available as a managed service, platform teams can focus on their mission to build what is unique to their business but common to their teams. They achieve this by combining composition with encapsulation of all associated processes and decoupled delivery across any target environment. The core value of kro lies in the idea of a ResourceGraphDefinition. Each definition abstracts many Kubernetes objects behind a single API. This API specifies what users may configure when requesting an instance, which resources are created per request, how those sub-resources depend on each other, and what status should be exposed back to the users and dependent resources. kro then acts as a controller that responds to these definitions by creating a new user-facing CRD and managing requests against it through an optimized resource DAG.