Now that most of us have moved at least part of our workloads to the cloud, the logical question is, "What's next?" We are almost certainly adopting a multi-cloud strategy to leverage innovation from multiple sources, reduce the dependency on a single provider and, overall, pick the right service for the job. However, that creates 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 at 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 manage all that through a control plane that is not tied to a specific set of tasks or a specific vendor. We need an open source universal control plane that will set the standard for how cloud vendors operate and how their services can be mixed and modeled to our specific needs. Crossplane (an open source project) might be such a solution.