Continuing in our Meet the Maintainer series, we have Aisuko Li. Aisuko is a maintainer of the Meshery Adapters project. In this interview, we get to know Aisuko a little better and learn about his journey as an open source project maintainer and with Layer5 community.
Aisuko, thank you for joining me today. Many people inside and outside of the Layer5 Community have seen the effects of your contributions, but may not know the backstory as to who Aisuko is and how you arrived at your maintainer role. Indulge us. How did you discover the Layer5 community? What made you stay?
Thanks for having me here. Actually, Aisuko is my code name. My real name is Bowen Li. I love both of I used to work for RancherLabs for a while, and I worked to maintain the official Helm (a third-party management tool for Kubernetes manifests) charts repo. These experiences helped me contribute to creating and maintaining Meshery Helm charts.
I like open source software, and I love contributing to the community. The more you contribute, the more permission you get to help the community grow and improve.
The Layer5 community is a true open source community. Everyone here can find a comfortable role. I have been here since 2019 (a long time ago). I’ve seen new members join and some leave. It's great to see people work together without any other conditions. This is one of the ways I have fun.
You’ve been consistently contributing to a large number of Layer5 projects (Meshery adapters, mesheryctl, SMI, SMP). Layer5 has a large collection of active projects. Which one are you currently focusing on? Psst. Also, which one’s your favorite? I won’t tell.
Actually, the Meshery project in 2021-2022 has changed a lot. More skilled and talented contributors joined the community. They are so professional and active, and their hard work has made Meshery more powerful than before. For instance, projects like `meshkit` and `meshsync` have grown significantly. It’s great to have such a strong team working together.
Right now, I am primarily focusing on the `meshery-operator` project and `meshery-linkerd`, along with fixing bugs across all the projects. I always aim to make all the projects more controllable and maintain high code quality.
Have you worked with any other open source projects? How does Layer5 compare?
I was active in the Rancher community and the Helm charts project, where I owned three charts. I’m also still a maintainer of the GNU Hurd. Recently, I’ve been working on contributions to Kubernetes community projects as well.
Compared to the Layer5 community, the Kubernetes community is much larger. Many members are not very active, so it can be difficult to get feedback on PRs and issues from inactive members.
The GNU Hurd project is unique, so there’s no need to compare it with others. In the Layer5 community, we have a warm welcome for new contributors, and most projects have active reviewers who provide feedback quickly.
Fascinating. Why did you pick service meshes specifically, though?
I have worked with many middle- and small-sized companies that wanted to migrate to the cloud. It’s easy to move to Kubernetes, but it’s hard to ensure everything runs smoothly. You have limited visibility into what’s happening in the cluster, and service mesh solves that problem by showing real-time traffic.
Service mesh provides direct insights into traffic flows, which is its most useful feature.
Haha. Leading on from that, what should Meshery dream about next? What can we hope to contribute to the service mesh landscape in your opinion?
I once talked to Lee, the founder of Layer5. Due to time zone differences, we don’t get many chances to discuss things directly. But I believe we don’t need to create a new service mesh.
What we should do is provide third-party performance tools for existing service mesh projects. We should give the choice back to the users, letting them pick the service mesh that best suits their needs.
We should contribute to SMI and CNCF projects, helping to define performance standards for the cloud-native industry. That’s why I’m keen on joining these communities.
Interesting. Do expand on that. What do you think Meshery could offer, in addition to what it already does?
I believe we can offer a CNCF-standard performance tool for all service mesh applications. We can collaborate with service mesh maintainers to define these standards, which would be beneficial for end-users. It’s similar to what we did with SMI.
What are today's challenges when working with service meshes?
Even though service mesh has many features, it's still not always stable in production. I remember that even Istio (v1.1x) couldn’t be upgraded to newer versions easily.
Additionally, we don’t often get test results from real production environments. Right now, the focus is on multi-cluster service mesh capabilities, which brings new challenges.
That’s good to hear. What do you think we should look forward to with respect to service mesh development?
I’ve worked with service mesh applications like Linkerd2, Istio, and OSM in development environments. OSM is my preference because it’s modular and has a simpler architecture compared to others.
From my experience, I believe that not all environments need all the features of a service mesh. Some middle or small companies may only need visibility into traffic flows without complex features like mTLS.
So, we should focus on simple architecture and features. For example, integrating traffic visualization with Ingress, so users don’t need to create new custom resources to track traffic.
Ah, while I have you here, let me get more reading recommendations lined up. Cloud Native and especially the field of service meshes is evolving exceptionally fast. Keeping up with all the developments can be challenging. Which resources do you use to stay up-to-date?
People are always interested in new technology, but we are limited by time. I believe that continuing to contribute to the service mesh open source community is the best way to stay updated.
Articles and news may include the author’s personal opinions, and we don't always know if they have strong relationships with the community. We should maintain critical thinking and focus on solving real-world problems. The best way to learn is through hands-on experience.
What does being a Meshery maintainer mean to you? How has being a maintainer impacted your full-time role?
It’s an honor to be a maintainer of the Meshery community. The membership is a reward for contributing to the community. Being a maintainer has made me more enthusiastic about contributing to open source projects. It has also given me confidence to contribute to other projects.
Do you have any advice for individuals hoping to become Layer5 contributors or potentially maintainers?
The Layer5 and Meshery communities are always welcoming to everyone. New features are great, but there’s more to contributing than just code. For example, writing unit tests and code comments is just as important as adding new features.
One of our goals is to provide an opportunity for everyone who wants to contribute to open source projects, so we need to maintain a high level of code quality.
The Meshery project moves at an impressive pace thanks to maintainers like Aisuko. Be like Aisuko. Join the Layer5 Slack and say “hi".
