Meshery: Open-source cloud-native manager for Kubernetes
Meshery is an open-source tool for designing, deploying and managing Kubernetes infrastructure, built by Layer5 and its community and hosted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. Teams use it to lay out clusters and applications on a visual canvas, check the design, and push it to multiple clusters and clouds from one central console, without hand-editing YAML.
Kubernetes runs on configuration files, and one wrong field or mismatched API version can sink a deployment. Meshery can catch those errors before a change reaches a live cluster. It runs Kubernetes’ own dry-run, a simulated deployment that applies nothing, and reports invalid resources, missing fields and version conflicts. Teams can wire the same check into a CI/CD pipeline so a faulty change fails before it ships.
Meshery draws the connections for you
Meshery works out how the pieces of a design connect, such as a pod mounting a persistent volume, an ingress routing to a service, or a cluster role assigned to a service account. It shows those links on the canvas and uses them to apply configuration rules. The rules run on Open Policy Agent, and users do not have to write its Rego query language.
Connected to a GitHub repository, Meshery posts infrastructure snapshots into pull requests, so reviewers can see what a change does before they merge it. Workspaces group a team’s designs and control who can reach each environment, a set of connections and credentials managed together.
The numbers
Meshery supports more than 380 integrations, and its public catalog holds more than 220 ready-made designs, from a WordPress and MySQL stack to an Istio control plane. For adoption, Meshery lists HPE, Intel, Red Hat, VMware, Ericsson and DigitalOcean among its users.
Meshery generates HTTP, gRPC and TCP traffic with the Fortio load generator, charts latency in histograms, and compares latency and throughput between runs. Saved performance profiles let a team rerun the same test after each release and track how a workload changes over time. Meshery pulls cluster and application metrics from Prometheus and can import existing Grafana dashboards.
Getting started
The browser-based playground at play.meshery.io needs no installation. For a real setup, a single command installs Meshery, which runs as a set of containers inside or outside a cluster. It supports Docker, AKS, EKS, GKE, kind, Minikube, OpenShift and Rancher, plus Mac, Linux and Windows, with Raspberry Pi support in progress.
Meshery is available for free on GitHub.
Must read:
- 20 open-source cybersecurity tools to keep your team ready for anything
- GitHub CISO on security strategy and collaborating with the open-source community
Subscribe to the Help Net Security ad-free monthly newsletter to stay informed on the essential open-source cybersecurity tools. Subscribe here!
