Now that most of us moved at least part of our workload to the cloud, the logical question is, "what’s next?" We are almost certainly adopting the multi-cloud strategy to leverage innovation from multiple sources, reduce dependency on a single provider, and, overall, pick the right service for the job. However, that opens a whole new set of issues. How do we manage infrastructure, services, and applications in such a heterogeneous setup? How do we make it easy and transparent at the same time? How do we deal with many different APIs and control planes enforced by all the cloud vendors we use? How do we rise above the clouds? The answer to those questions, as well as a glimpse of what’s coming, is in a universal control plane. We need a mechanism that will enable us to create our own platforms by picking the services we need, composing new ones that fit our needs, and managing all that through a control plane that is not tied to a specific set of tasks or a specific vendor. Crossplane (an open-source project) might be such a solution.