We’re on The Cloud Native Landscape!

This is a story about growing together as a community and building a project that matters.

Getting into the Mesh

About a year and a half ago I got interested in service mesh technology. A customer needed some advanced routing capabilities and we started looking at Envoy and Istio. Then - invitations to talk about Istio at meetups and conferences started flowing in. That’s when I got excited about progressive delivery capabilities that service meshes enable. I even wrote a Kubernetes Istio canary controller - BirdWatch.

Finding Meshery

Digging deeper into what service meshes had to offer I discovered Meshery - the universal service mesh management plane. And immediately joined Layer5 - the great, welcoming open-source community that created it.

Community Matters

Being a member of Layer5 was one of the nicest community experiences I’ve ever had. Mainly thanks to community’s founder and captain - Lee Calcote. He always makes sure everybody feels significant, included and motivated to participate. And this spirit spreads out to all community activities.

In no time I had my first commits approved and merged and started joining weekly community and development video call.

We’re on CNCF Landscape!

Now - I won’t be reviewing Meshery in this post. I’ve spoken about it in this video and some great introductory articles by community members can be found here and here.

This post is more of a celebration - because last week Meshery finally got featured in the CNCF landscape ‘Service Mesh’ category! And this is only the first step - there’s already an application filed for Meshery to become a full-fledged CNCF sandbox project. I had a chance to collaborate on the sandbox proposal and am so eager for this to happen.

Get into the Mesh Pit

This is also an invitation to participate - Meshery is a young, ambitious project - it requires a ton of work to make it what it aims to become. Integrating with all of the leading service mesh solutions asks for extensive expertise. In many areas Meshery still sucks. But these are normal growth stages, aren’t they? To put it simple - the community and the project need more hands! And these should be your hands!

As already mentioned - Layer5 is a very welcoming bunch!

Become a Cloud Native Hero

Open source contributions are a must-do for becoming a true cloud native hero. Cloud native is all about the community and one can’t be a part of a community by only taking and never giving back.

So if you were looking for a promising and welcoming project to join - look no further! Hop on to Layer5 Slack and we’ll happily embrace you and help you get started.

And it’s not only coding! Documentation, testing, UI design, logos, blogs, videos - you decide where to apply your talent.

For example - I sometimes wish I had more time and motivation to code new Meshery features or fix existing bugs. But instead I’m writing this post. Because lately I enjoy writing texts more than coding. Coding for longer than a couple of days at a time throws me into a coding fatigue… Actually also many other activities do. I’m just not very good at keeping a routine. But I’m sure many of you out there aren’t like me. So why not join forces?

Sum It All Up

• Meshery is an exciting opportunity to learn more about service meshes

• We’re already on CNCF landscape and are headed for the sandbox

• Now is a great time to hop on board

Are you ready? Get into the mesh pit!