Crossplane v2 (released in late 2025) introduced a cleaner, namespaced resource model and removed a lot of the v1 ceremony around Claims and cluster-scoped composites. Upgrading the control plane to v2 is usually painless — if you're not using the v1 features that changed, your existing claims keep working thanks to backward compatibility.

The hard part is the next step: migrating your existing v1-style workloads onto v2-style namespaced resources. That's where there's still no cohesive, end-to-end story — and it's where I spent most of my effort taking a production EKS fleet all the way through.

This post is the field guide I wish I'd had: the adopt-in-place method, how to validate it before touching anything, and the three failure modes that will bite you in production.

Nothing here destroys or recreates cloud infrastructure. The whole point is to keep every existing AWS resource exactly where it is and just change which Crossplane resource owns it.

The setup (in generic terms)