Enabling teams to collaboratively design, deploy, and manage cloud native infrastructure without finger-pointing.
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.
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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.
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“Partnering on Dapr’s integration with Meshery has been eye-opening”, says Mauricio Salatino, Software Engineer at Diagrid and author of Platform Engineering on Kubernetes. “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.”
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 for Kanvas’ novel collaboration experience. Meshery has thousands of pre-built components 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”, says Lee Calcote, Layer5 founder, “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.”
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. -Support for Kubernetes and multi-cloud services.
– Self-Service DevOps: Empower engineers to create, share, and manage their own environments on demand.
– Greenfields and Brownfield infrastructure: Import existing cloud environments to visualize your current infrastructure or create a new design from scratch.
– GitOps Integration: Pull request integration for infrastructure design reviews.
– Model-driven characterization of 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.
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Kanvas caters to a wide range of users, including:
– 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
– 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 of 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 management”, said Yogi Porla, CTO of Deeplineage. “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.”
Kanvas Designer is available now in beta as a service or self-hosted solution. Kanvas Operator will be available early next year.
Resources
– Kanvas application:Â https://kanvas.new
– Design Catalog:Â https://cloud.layer5.io/catalog
– Kanvas website:Â https://layer5.io/kanvas
– Kanvas documentation:Â https://docs.layer5.io/kanvas
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