[Salt Lake City, UT] [KubeCon + CloudNativeCon] - November 14th, 2024 – Layer5, the open source company behind the popular Meshery project, announces Kanvas, a new collaboration platform that is like Google Workspace, but designed for engineering teams.
Kanvas is a multi-modal collaboration suite built atop one of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s highest velocity open source projects: Meshery. Kanvas’s two modes, Designer and Operator, offer declarative and imperative DevOps workflows, respectively. Both modes provide a visual interface for creating and managing complex cloud native infrastructure, expediting collaborative problem-solving, brainstorming and innovation, engineer onboarding, and auto-documented infrastructure. Importantly, Kanvas helps teams avoid finger-pointing and the blame-game by allowing them to be on the same page - literally.
Partnering on Dapr’s integration with Meshery has been eye-opening. Kanvas promotes collaboration in the design and discussion of cloud native applications, eliminating misunderstandings between teams. It is a game-changer for how we navigate the complexities of relationships between system components
—Mauricio Salatino
Software Engineer at Diagrid and author of Platform Engineering on Kubernetes
As an extensible, self-service engineering platform with hundreds of technology integrations, supporting multi-cloud and Kubernetes native infrastructure, Meshery is the ideal management platform upon which to build Kanvas’ novel collaboration experience. Meshery has thousands of pre-built components supporting Kubernetes and Cloud services and with over 2,000 contributors, Meshery is the 9th fastest growing CNCF (out of 200+ projects).
Internal developer platforms, like Meshery, are rising in popularity, because engineering teams remain siloed with disparate tooling, inconsistent workflow, lack of collaboration and shared process. A lack of collaboration plagues engineering teams with 83% of IT organizations implementing DevOps practices. 62% of organizations are stuck mid-DevOps evolution, teams tightly coupled and responsibilities diffused. Engineering teams desperately need to collaborate, but lack tooling specifically designed for cloud native infrastructure.
Lee Calcote
Layer5 founder
Like Figma for engineers, Kanvas users can access Kanvas from any computer with an internet connection and a web browser.
Feature Highlights:
- Infrastructure as Design: Intuitive drag-and-drop interface for designing and visualizing cloud native infrastructure and general architecture diagrams. Supports Kubernetes and multi-cloud services.
- Self-Service DevOps: Empowers engineers to create, share, and manage their own environments on demand.
- Greenfields and Brownfield Infrastructure: Import existing cloud environments to visualize current infrastructure or create a new design from scratch.
- GitOps Integration: Pull request integration for infrastructure design reviews.
- Model-Driven characterization of both semantic and non-semantic infrastructure as design components.
- Policy-driven intelligent inference of infrastructure components and their relationships.
- Real-Time Collaboration: Work with others on your designs in real-time, making it easier to collaborate and share ideas, while all changes are saved automatically.
- Design Patterns: A catalog full of ready-made blueprints for common infrastructure and application architectures.
- Kanvas Spaces: provide a collaborative environment similar to Google Shared Drive, but specifically tailored for cloud-native infrastructure management.
- Design Reviews: Collaboratively review and provide feedback on designs and prototypes.
Birth of Kanvas from Meshery
- Teams and engineering managers for brainstorming, diagramming, wireframing, and interviewing.
- Platform engineers for underpinning self-service and developer empowerment.
- Site reliability engineers for curating a catalog of design patterns as a center of excellence.
- Operators for managing and visualizing infrastructure components.
- Solution architects designing infrastructure across multiple cloud providers from a single canvas.
- Developer advocates and educators for facilitating real-time exploration and asynchronous study of any cloud native technology.
- Developers and product engineers for ease of understanding and design of their application infrastructure.
- System integrators and consultants for a service provider-grade organization hierarchy, multi-tenant, white-labelable, highly extensible delivery platform.
Layer5 Kanvas is revolutionizing our approach to infrastructure design. With its collaborative environment, we're seeing significant gains in efficiency and cost-effectiveness, streamlining our workflows and fostering a shared understanding between our customers and partners. Any team that needs a shared space to collaborate and visualize ideas can benefit from using Kanvas.
—Yogi Porla
CTO of Deeplineage
Kanvas Designer is available now in beta as a service or self-hosted solution. Kanvas Operator will be available early next year. Try dragging and dropping your Kubernetes manifest into https://kanvas.new today.
Resources
- Kanvas application: https://kanvas.new.
- Design Catalog: https://cloud.layer5.io/catalog.
- Kanvas website: https://layer5.io/cloud-native-management/kanvas.
- Kanvas documentation: https://docs.layer5.io/kanvas/.
- Attend KubeCon NA 2024 Session: Visualizing Kubernetes Resource Relationships with Meshery.
About Layer5, Inc.
Our open source and commercial products empower organizations to embrace the power of cloud native with confidence. Layer5's mission is to simplify the adoption and operation of cloud native infrastructure, enabling organizations to innovate faster and engineers to do so collaboratively. Layer5’s award-winning open source community has over 10,000 members. For more information, visit https://layer5.io
About Kanvas
Kanvas is a web-based collaboration tool that allows you to create, review, and operate highly-detailed architecture diagrams of your cloud and cloud infrastructure using a drag-and-drop interface. Kanvas is popular with site reliability engineers, platform engineers, architects, operators, and developers as an enabler of productive, collaborative infrastructure management. Try Kanvas at https://kanvas.new.
