TL;DR: The thing that finally broke me was watching our deploy pipeline sit at "Applying Terraform plan... " for 28 minutes straight. 📖 Reading time: ~30 min What's in this article The Problem: Your CI/CD Pipeline Is Doing Too Much Kubernetes Babysitting What Crossplane Actually Does (One Paragraph, Then We Move On) Setup: Getting Crossplane Running in Your Cluster Defining Your Infrastructure as Compositions Wiring Crossplane Into Your CI/CD Pipeline The Performance Wins You Actually Get Observability: Knowing When Things Go Wrong When This Setup Is Wrong for You The Problem: Your CI/CD Pipeline Is Doing Too Much Kubernetes Babysitting The thing that finally broke me was watching our deploy pipeline sit at "Applying Terraform plan..." for 28 minutes straight. The actual application deploy — the thing the pipeline exists to do — took four minutes. We were spending 87% of our CI time provisioning infrastructure that, frankly, should have already been there waiting for us.…