Introduction

On November 11, 2025, during KubeCon North America, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced the global availability of the Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineer (CNPE) certification.

As with all CNCF Certifications, before the official launch, there’s a beta tester release. The idea is that people with skills and backgrounds aligned with the certifications take the exam before the global launch to analyze difficulty, question comprehension, and even find bugs or issues with the environment or exam questions.

As we have seen lately, Crossplane took over the world of Platform Engineering providing an absolutely easy and powerful way to build cloud native control planes.

But how does it work? How can I use it? What are the gains?

This brief post, which is created to be the initial one for a Crossplane series, aims to answer some basic questions for those who are still eager to use it.