​

Partnership

Community Platform

Performance Management

Learning Academy

Design Pattern Catalog

Entitlement & Approvals

Hierarchical organizations for MSPs, extensible permissions and audit trails

Load Generation and Performance Characterization

Learning paths with live labs and certifications

Collaborative

Canvas

Identity & Permissions

Multiplayer Designer and Operator modes

A customizable community platform tightly integrated with the cloud native ecosystem.

Self-service engineering platform

Meshery

Customizable approvals with webhooks for Slack, Stripe, and email integration

Individual social profile with badges

Meshery Project Velocity�github.com/cncf/velocity

6th highest velocity project out of 234 CNCF projects

​

​

1/1/2023 - 1/1/2024 10th�1/1/2022 - 1/1/2023 19th

1/1/2021 - 1/1/2022 31st

1/1/2020 - 1/1/2021 33rd

COMMUNITY

New Contributors

Dedicated Newcomer Mentoring Program

Layer5 communities:

• Forming now in Nigeria, India, Mexico, Guatemala
• Forming soon in El Salvador and Francett

Newcomer Onboarding Program

#eeff41

COMMUNITY

#1 Most Popular Project

Linux Foundation Mentorship Program

Out of all CNCF and Linux Foundation projects

discussions of product plans with Meshery inside^®

The word is out

160,000 performance tests run using Meshery

considering Meshery as the CNCF Hub

10,500 followers

5,500 followers

1,500 followers

1,000 stars

10,000 stars

250 stars

3,200 followers

1,800 followers

350 followers

9,000 members at ~10/day

14,000 subscribers

1,500 subscribers

TRACTION

Layer5 Cloud

400+ �Monthly Active Users

​

excludes open source users

150% GitHub Star Growth

on Meshery in last 6 months

Academy

Training and Certification

�

See Academy docs for additional details not covered in these slides.

Developing Community

🚀 Offer gamified challenges and hands-on labs to ignite competition and boost user interaction, creating a vibrant, self-sustaining community.

📣 Empower your community members with shareable, official badges, turning your certified experts into credible brand ambassadors on social media.

📖 Build guided learning paths that transform complex technology into a simple, step-by-step journey so your community members can go from novice to expert.

My community isn't large enough or active enough

Our products can be hard to learn

Expanding brand reach is slow

Core Content Types

Academy

Guided Learning Paths

Gamified Challenges

Verifiable Certifications

Embedded Kanvas design examples �(Storage, Load Balancing, Traffic)

Example user profile

Certifications�Academy

Layer5 Academy focuses on cloud and cloud-native technologies, which complements Exoscale’s portfolio of cloud services like Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS) and Database as a Service (DBaaS).

Offering certifications through Layer5 allow Exoscale to provide specialized training on its cloud platform within the context of broader cloud-native standards, enhancing learners’ ability to apply Exoscale’s tools in real-world, multi-cloud environments.

raw, profile

raw, profile

view, download

Challenges

Academy

Periodically or on an ongoing basis, present a public challenge on cloud native concepts.

​

Example: Distributed Tracing with Jaeger

Challenge Rules�

1. Each challenger (participant) needs to register to participate.
2. Each challenge is assigned a predefined number of points, depending upon level of difficulty and number of objectives included.
3. Participants earn points for each objective completed as long as those objectives are completed within the timeframe defined in the challenge.

Content Creation

Process

✔︎ Markdown-driven, self-published Academy content

✔︎ Automated publishing via GitHub release

✔︎ Hugo-powered

​

All content from learn.exoscale.dev and academy.exoscale.com has been imported.

See github.com/layer5io/exoscale-academy

Curriculum Structure Example

Your content. Your intellectual property. Your publishing process.

Learning Path: Cloud Fundamentals

Course: Intro DBaaS

Module: Why Databases?

Page: History of Databases

Page: Selection of Databases

Page: Tools for Data

Lab: Working with database clusters

Test: Module Quiz

​

Module: Why Managed Databases?

Page: Responsibility and Expertise

Page: Managed Databases� Lab: Exploring Exoscale DBaaS

Test: Module Quiz�

Module: Summary

Page: Recap of cloud fundamentals

Test: Cumulative Final Exam

See Academy docs for other curriculum types.

Recognizing Community Member Milestones

Automatic awarding of recognition upon:

• completion of learning paths and challenges.
• certificate upon passing of certification exam.

Showcase learner, user, and contributor achievements with recognition.

Gamify cloud native architecture with a learner leaderboard.

Instructor Console

Academy

​

Analytics and Reporting:

Instructors have access to detailed analytics on course effectiveness and student learning outcomes.

​

​

​

Student Progress Tracking: Instructors can view completion rates for courses and individual labs, track quiz scores, and identify areas where students may be struggling.

​

​

Simple Content Creation Template Generator

Granular View of Evaluation Performance

Curriculum Panorama

Learner Engagement Analysis

Onboard a New Partner

Invite their entire team with a single, powerful link valid only for their *@partner.com domain

Hire a New Engineer

Send a private invite that automatically places them on the correct team with the "Developer" role, ready to contribute from day one.

Host a Challenge

Drive engagement with a public challenge link, creating an expiration date and a limit of 10,000 participants.

Inviting New Learners

Control Your Academy Growth

Learner Lifecycle

docs.layer5.io/cloud/security/roles/academy-roles

• The entire catalog of published offerings is always browsable by users.
• Invitations control eligibility of enrollment for learners to specific offerings.

Recognition

awarded

Academy Sign-up

Not Registered

Added to team, assigned role.

Did not complete course requisites.

Offering expired or is no longer published

Anonymous, named person(s), or domain(s)

not a user

Completed

a specific offering

Next Steps

Academy Staff Activities

Open org invitation (create your user account and profile)

Customize your organization

Accurately represent your project and its capabilities

1. Customize your organization’s predefined user dashboard

Train users on Exoscale

Use the Academy as training grounds for new and existing users

• Develop Learning Paths for learners
• Create interesting Challenges for users

Acknowledge user milestones

Nurture your user base with public recognition

1. Award badges to users. Celebrate user achievements and foster community engagement through public recognition
2. Users embed your badges in their social profiles.

Illustrate key concepts visually

Use architecture diagrams to help users grasp complex ideas

1. Embed design patterns on your project site and in your docs
2. Your designs link to the playground. Let users experiment and get hands-on experience with your project right away.

Curate Reference Architectures

Promote production-grade deployment considerations

1. Curate and your own verified designs in the Catalog
2. Publish reference architectures
3. Track five different metrics on content popularity (Leaderboard)

Offer Challenges

Use architecture diagrams to help users grasp complex ideas

​

• Create an SKS-related challenge using the Voting App.
• Embed design patterns on your project site and in your docs
• Users open design and get hands-on experience right away.

Partnerships

Partner: Docker

Docker Desktop Extension

Kubernetes supplied by Docker.

​

Cloud native management supplied by Meshery.

​

Together, cloud native tooling to the developers’ desktop.

GO TO MARKET

Launched at DockerCon 2022

Partner: Equinix

Bare metal servers supplied by Equinix

​

Community development by Layer5

​

Together, delivering cloud native tooling to the engineers’ web browser

Equinix:

• 3 bare metal servers at ~$2,000 per month per server
• 10 Enterprise seats

Layer5:

• Active representation of Equinix (devrel)
• Enhancement of documentation; self-hosted GitHub Action runner
• Performance validation of Kubernetes on bare metal service

Multiplayer Internal Developer Platform

Figma for DevOps

​

Visualization is #1 most requested feature of HashiCorp Terraform.

“This is exactly what I need, so that I can stop arguing our devs.”��

- Yash, Site Reliability Engineer �@ Sprinklr

“I have dreamed of having stuff end-to-end visualized automatically, including dns, tcp, ssl, config sources, etc.”

​

- David, CDN Architect

@ Garmin

GitOps-centric. High frequency of use; multiple times a day.

Multi-user. Real-time collaboration. No more finger-pointing.

Engineers self-service and avoid misunderstandings. Find common ground.

Sprawl is real. Engineers regain control visually.

“Unreal. When can I deploy this in my air-gapped systems?”��

- Phillip, Solutions Architect �@ Raymond James Financial

Thousands of pre-built components for Kubernetes and Cloud.

SOLUTION

Create�Kanvas Designer

Meshery Catalog

Import Docker Compose apps, Helm Charts, or Kubernetes Manifests for visual configuration

Cloud Native Components

Hundreds of versioned components to choose from

Designs and Patterns

Compose designs. Reuse designs as patterns.

WebAssembly Filters

Import, configure, chain, and deploy your WASM filters

Collaboration

Real-time Collaboration

Collaborate in real-time on multi-cloud designs.

Annotate your designs

Facilitates clearer communication by allowing visual annotations on specific design components

Faster Reviews

leverage comments to enhance collaboration and streamline design reviews.

Export Designs

No lock-in

Embed your design

Your architecture diagrams never grow old when you embed Meshery designs into your existing website.

Exporting as the Unmodified Source

Exporting it as an Original (Design) will give you the original source file.

Exporting as a Current File

Provides you with a YAML file representing the current snapshot of your design.

Exporting as OCI

Export as a container image. Push to the registry of your choice.

Operate�Kanvas Visualizer

Interactive Terminal

Establish sessions with one or more pods at-a-time

Real-time Performance Metrics

Object-specific metrics and alerts

Log Stream

Live tail a stream of logs from one or more pods at-a-time. Apply search filter for log keywords.

Performance Metrics

Sliding window of past performance

Shared Views

Customize your view, save, and share to collaborate with teammates.

Operate�Kanvas Visualizer

Real-time Performance Metrics

Object-specific metrics and alerts

Historical Performance Metrics

Sliding window of past performance

Shared Views

Customize your view, save, and share to collaborate with teammates.

Interactive Terminal

Establish sessions with one or more pods at-a-time

Log Stream

Live tail a stream of logs from one or more pods at-a-time. Apply search filter for keywords.

Peer Review

Comments History

Access the comment history to review previous discussions and decisions.

Utilize Mentions

Draw the attention of relevant team members by tagging them in your comment.

Initiate Threads

Initiate a thread by just adding a comment.

Notifications Customization

Customize your notification preferences to receive emails for comments on your design.

Regain Control.

Kanvas Designer

History*

Audit trail and change history

Designed Configuration

Object-specific settings

Workflow*

Custom pre and post-provisioning logic sequences

GitOps*

Pipeline integration and behavior

Policy*

Distributed evaluation and enforcement

Permissions*

Granular RBAC control over configuration

Relationships

Custom pre and post-provisioning logic sequences

JSON Schema

Custom pre and post-provisioning logic sequences

Labels

Automatic grouping of components by tag

Exoscale Certificates

raw, profile

raw, profile

view, download

Regain Control.

Kanvas Designer

History*

Audit trail and change history

Designed Configuration

Object-specific settings

Workflow*

Custom pre and post-provisioning logic sequences

GitOps*

Pipeline integration and behavior

^{*Roadmap items}

Policy*

Distributed evaluation and enforcement

Permissions*

Granular RBAC control over configuration

Cloud Native Playground

Unleashing Cloud Native Adoption

The Amazing (and Confusing) CNCF Landscape

​

A Daunting Barrier

Over 200 CNCF projects that users, maintainers, and Ambassadors have to comprehend.

​

Exploring, understanding, and deploying projects individually is time-consuming and resource-intensive for users, hindering adoption.

​

With less time available to explore projects - and how different projects interrelate with one another - users are attracted to projects with readily available demo systems. Hosting and maintaining a demo system requires an ongoing investment of time and money by maintainers, hindering innovation.

What are the projects and what do they do? The CNCF Landscape offers quick answers to these questions, but beyond categorization and a brief description, users are left to respective projects’ docs with their mileage varying between ease of exploration.

Unleashing Cloud Native Adoption

The CNCF Hub

A collaborative, hosted environment where users can explore, experiment, and learn ALL CNCF projects in one unified space, where maintainers and ambassadors can readily espouse project configuration and deployment best practices.

�Example: playground.meshery.io

Proposed: hub.cncf.io (try at this open invitation)

DevRel: Empowered to Make Cloud Native Ubiquitous

• Increase project visibility and adoption
• Showcase project capabilities and attract new users.�
• Enhance engagement
• Foster collaboration and community building around and between projects.�
• Enhance DevRel experience
• Leverage a frictionless way to try projects, demo their capabilities and cross-pollinate projects and technology circles.

Program invite for Ambassadors

Program invite for Captains

All Badges

Exoscale: Fueled for Innovation

Empowered maintainers

• Get direct feedback and contributions from users, accelerating project development.
• Recognize users and encourage contributors.�

Standardized best practices

• Curate and share "official" configuration and deployment guides within the Playground's dedicated catalog.
• Project maintainers designate and endorse content, ensuring its accuracy and relevance.
• Leverage the existing, successful model of the Catalog.

Users: Unleash Your Cloud Native Potential

Demystify the CNCF ecosystem

• Seamlessly explore and interact with any project, regardless of experience.

​

Accelerate learning

• Experiment freely, learn by doing, and build confidence in cloud native architectures.

​

Collaborate and share

• Work with others, contribute to projects, and learn from the broader community.

​

Simplify adoption

• Quickly assess and deploy projects based on real-world experience.

Why Meshery?

Built for Collaboration and Learning

• Neutral and open-source platform: A CNCF project built on and seamlessly integrated with all other CNCF projects.
• Promote from within: The CNCF uses third-party services for many of its services offered to projects. In this case, it will be using one of its own projects to offer project, contributor, Ambassador, and user services.
• Foster project collaboration: Showcase how each project integrates with and bolsters the other in a way in which individual demo systems can’t.
• Browse and Discover: Drag-and-drop cloud native infrastructure using a palette of thousands of versioned CNCF project components.
• Robust Access Controls: CNCF Staff equipped with global administrative permissions. Each project has its own Organization with any number of teams and users. Approval flows for Project Maintainers, who are granted “Catalog Curator” permission.
• Integrate with LFX Insights: Reinforce LFX Insights as the unified hub for CNCF.

Shared Objectives

1. Grease the wheels of project adoption, project exploration, and cross-pollination.
2. Bolster user and contributor affinity, loyalty, and goodwill toward the CNCF and its projects.
3. Assuage user complaints of an unnavigable, evergrowing project landscape.
4. Uplift all projects simultaneously, and to the degree possible, equally.

Proposal

1. hub.cncf.io - A white-labeled instance of Layer5 Cloud operated by Layer5 and managed by CNCF Staff and project maintainers.

Getting Started

User Guides

Maintainers’ Guide to CNCF Hub

Open Maintainer Invitation (click to join your user account)

Training users on your project

Use the Academy as training grounds for new and existing users

• Create interesting Challenges for users of your project
• Develop Learning Paths for users of your project

Designing with your project

Accurately represent your project and its capabilities

• Your project’s Meshery Models
• Components, relationships and their visualization
• Control your integration with other projects

Officiating your best practices

Promote production-grade deployment considerations

• Curate verified content; reference architectures
• Track popular content

Acknowledging user milestones

Nurture your user base with public recognition

• Receive your maintainer badge
• Award badges to users; Celebrate user achievements and foster community engagement through public recognition

Illustrate key concepts visually

Use architecture diagrams to help users grasp complex ideas

• Embed design patterns on your project site and in your docs
• Your designs link to the playground. Let users experiment and get hands-on experience with your project right away.

Project Example: Dapr

Meshery Integration (docs)

One Model

1. “dapr-vx.x.x” official project Helm chart�

Five Components

1. Component
2. Resiliency
3. Configuration
4. Http-endpoint
5. Subscription

​

Two Relationships

1. Sidecar configuration
2. Control plane label

Four Catalog Designs

1. In CNCF Hub (no designs with Verified class)
2. In Artifact Hub
3. In Meshery Catalog
4. In Dapr Docs (requested) Embedded Design

Learning paths and reference architectures

Call to Action:

1. Create a design (requested)
2. Publish reference architectures

Ambassador’s Guide

Train Users on Cloud Native

Use the Academy as training grounds for new and existing users

• Create interesting Challenges for users of your project.
• Develop Learning Paths for users of your project.

Create Cloud Native Designs

Accurately represent your project and its capabilities

• Your project’s Meshery Models and their visualization.
• Control your integration with other projects.

Promote Best Practices

Promote production-grade deployment considerations

• Curate verified content; reference architectures.
• Track popular content.

Recognition of Your Impact

Public recognition of your milestones achieved

• Receive your maintainer badge.
• Award badges to users; Celebrate user achievements and foster. community engagement through public recognition.

Illustrate Key Concepts Visually

Use architecture diagrams to help users grasp complex ideas

​

• Embed design patterns on your project site and in your docs.
• Users open design and get hands-on experience right away.

Join CNCF Hub Org

Create your hub profile

1. Open Ambassador Invitation.
2. Receive Ambassador badge.

1

2

3

4

5

6

How the Hub is organized

For CNCF Staff

Users

ORGANIZATIONAL UNITS

Resources

Public

Leaderboard

User

Challenger

Ambassador

Access

White-labeled

Learn more

Dashboard

Catalog

Reference Architectures

A collection of designs curated and shared as "verified" configuration and deployment guides in a public catalog for users to confidentially reference, customize and use.

Curating Reference Architectures

Instructions for CNCF Project Maintainers

Visibility and Adoption

• By showcasing project capabilities through well-curated reference architectures, maintainers can attract new users and increase project visibility.
• The CNCF Hub provides a unified space for users to explore and experiment with CNCF projects, further enhancing adoption.

​

Key Points

• Through the process of catalog curation, Project Maintainers play a crucial role ensuring the quality and relevance of reference architectures published in the CNCF Hub.
• The Hub provides a collaborative environment for maintainers to showcase project capabilities, engage with users, and foster adoption.
• Reference architectures make it easy for users to follow established guidelines and best practices, users can

​

Content Submission and Review Process

• Submitted content undergoes a review process, ensuring its accuracy, relevance, and adherence to CNCF standards.
• Project Maintainers can both submit and review requests to publish reference architectures to the public catalog.
• CNCF Project Maintainers are granted "Workspace Admin" permission, so that they can review and approve reference architecture submissions in order to curate the public catalog.
• CNCF Staff have global administrative permissions, overseeing the entire curation process.

​

Collaboration and Feedback

• Project Maintainers can directly engage with users, gather feedback, and encourage contributions to their reference architectures.
• The CNCF Hub's collaborative nature allows for ongoing refinement and improvement of reference architectures based on user feedback and community contributions.

​

An internal engineering platform

Meshery offers self-service collaboration

Proprietary Extensions

(sku-able offerings)

Layer5 decouples teams with a platform for shared context and role-specific self-help.

Open Core

Platform

ML-based Continuous Optimization

GitOps-based Lifecycle Management

AI-based Automated Remediation

Incident Management

Performance Management

Cost Control

Inventory and classification. Provisioning and policy-driven workflow. Patterns catalog. Fine-grained access control. Performance characterization.

​

Collaborative and Visual Infrastructure Management

Chaos Management

Identity & Access Management

Reference Architectures Walk-through

Customized Experience

✅Themed sign-up page, user invitation email, Catalog approval email, and customizable dashboard��Catalog

✅Catalog content classes for Reference Architecture designation.

✅Workspace Administrator role for catalog curation.

✅Catalog content publishing request routing queue per Workspace for CNCF Project Maintainer submission and CNCF Staff review.

Challenges

✅Academy Instructor role.

Pilot Maintainers

• Share an invitation to join the CNCF organization. Alternatively, invite specific users to CNCF organization. Both themed experiences.

Catalog

• Content classification in for Reference Arch.
• Sample reference architectures (e.g. Keda) published.

Organizational Structure

• Org / Team / Workspace (for reference architecture and for challenges)
• Only submitted by certain people
• Approved by Workspace Manager

Visual and Collaborative Experience

• Open Reference Architecture in Playground.

​

An Ambassador’s Guide to the CNCF Playground

Badges, Milestones, User Profile

Integration to LFX Insights

Report for Katie on Ambassador activity.

Trainer controls access to training material.�Trainers own content.