Meshery: Open-Source Kubernetes Cloud-Native Platform

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Meshery is an open-source platform designed for the orchestration, deployment, and management of Kubernetes environments, developed by Layer5 and its community, and hosted under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Overview

Meshery enables teams to create, visualize, and manage Kubernetes clusters and applications through a graphical interface, allowing them to validate configurations and deploy changes across multiple clusters and cloud environments from a centralized dashboard without manually editing YAML files.

Kubernetes Configuration and Dry-run

Kubernetes relies on configuration files, and even minor errors such as incorrect fields or version mismatches can disrupt deployments. Meshery mitigates this risk by leveraging Kubernetes’ built-in dry-run functionality, which simulates deployments without applying changes. This process identifies invalid resources, missing parameters, and version conflicts before configurations are applied to live clusters. Teams can integrate these checks into CI/CD pipelines to ensure faulty changes are rejected before deployment.

Relationship Mapping and Policy Enforcement

The platform automatically maps relationships between components, such as pods accessing persistent volumes, ingress routes directing traffic to services, or cluster roles assigned to service accounts. These connections are visualized on the interface and used to enforce configuration policies via Open Policy Agent. Users are not required to write Rego queries, as the system handles policy enforcement automatically.

GitHub Integration and Workspaces

When connected to a GitHub repository, Meshery generates infrastructure snapshots within pull requests, enabling reviewers to assess changes before merging. Workspaces within Meshery organize team projects and manage access to environments, which include predefined sets of connections and credentials.

Integrations and Adopters

The platform supports over 380 integrations, with a public catalog offering more than 220 preconfigured designs, ranging from WordPress and MySQL stacks to Istio control planes. Notable adopters include HPE, Intel, Red Hat, VMware, Ericsson, and DigitalOcean.

Performance Testing

Mesher includes tools for performance testing, generating HTTP, gRPC, and TCP traffic using the Fortio load generator. It visualizes latency through histograms and compares metrics across test runs. Saved performance profiles allow teams to retest workloads after each release, tracking changes in latency and throughput over time. The platform also collects metrics from Prometheus and supports the integration of existing Grafana dashboards.

Installation and Availability

To begin, users can access a browser-based sandbox at play.meshery.io without installation. For production use, a single command installs Meshery as a set of containers, compatible with Docker, AKS, EKS, GKE, kind, Minikube, OpenShift, and Rancher, as well as macOS, Linux, and Windows. Raspberry Pi support is currently in development. The tool is freely available on GitHub.