Meshery v0.8.0

Meshery v0.8.0: A Major Leap Forward for Cloud Native Management

We’re thrilled to unveil Meshery v0.8.0! This release marks a significant milestone in Meshery’s journey, introducing powerful features and enhancements that streamline cloud native infrastructure management. Since the release of v0.7.0, we’ve been busy building a more robust, extensible, and user-friendly platform. Here’s a glimpse of what’s new: We are excited to announce the release of Meshery v0.8.0! This release includes a number of new features and improvements.

Registry & Models: Enhanced Management and Control

The Meshery Registry takes center stage in v0.8.0, acting as the central repository for all capabilities known to Meshery. The registry is where all 320+ Meshery models are imported into each running Meshery deployment. The registry includes models and their components, relationships, connections, credentials, and policies.

Additional First-Class Constructs: Whereas Components were the focal point of how Meshery characterized entities under management, in v0.8.0, Models and Relationships now have equal treatment among the treated as first-class resources, enabling easier management, versioning, import/export functionality, and their dynamic generation.
New Model Generators: Introduced in v0.7.0 timeframe, what were once separate scripts are a collection of reused libraries (yes, coming from MeshKit) across Meshery Server and notably, within mesheryctl registry commands. Enhanced functioality includes model generation direct from GitHub, CSV, Helm repo, Artifact Hub, OCI image, and local file. See Generating Models to learn more.
SelectorSets for Relationships: SelectorSets allow you to define complex relationships between components with greater precision.

OCI Support: Streamlined Packaging and Distribution

Meshery v0.8.0 embraces Open Container Image (OCI) as the standard format for packaging and distributing Meshery Designs and Models. This ensures seamless sharing and integration across the ecosystem.

Publish and Share: Import and export Meshery models using Meshery’s UI, CLI, or ReST API. Push and pull models and designs from OCI registries, including AWS ECR, GitHub Registry, and Docker Hub.

Spaces: Organize and Collaborate

Environments - Group your deployment targets (on-premises servers or cloud services) into logical environments for better organization. Workspaces - Boost team collaboration with dedicated workspaces, facilitating shared management and configuration of cloud native infrastructure.

Extensibility & Extensions: Expanding the Meshery Ecosystem

Helm Kanvas Snapshot - Helm Kanvas Snapshot is a Helm chart that allows you to take snapshots of your Kubernetes resources and sync them with Meshery Server. This extension makes it easier to manage and track changes to resources over time.

Looking ahead, additional extensions are planned for v0.9, including kubectl MeshSync Snapshot and kubectl Kanvas Snapshot. These extensions will allow users to take snapshots of their Kubernetes resources and sync them with Meshery Server. This will make it easier to manage and track changes to resources over time.

Meshery Catalog functions much like a cloud marketplace, providing a user-friendly interface for browsing, discovering, and sharing configurations and patterns for cloud native infrastructure. In v0.8, Meshery Catalog expands its capabilities with user-defined models, robust filters, and Artifact Hub integration.

Contributed Models: Learn how to share your models with the community and discover new ones.
Artifact Hub Integration: Browse and publish Meshery Designs on Artifact Hub, expanding the reach and accessibility of reusable configurations.

Browse the catalog or learn more about how it works.

You can now browse Meshery Designs in the Artifact Hub search. An integration with Artifact Hub is delivered in this release, allowing you to publish your Meshery Designs to the Artifact Hub, a community-driven catalog of Kubernetes applications with over 200 Meshery designs to date and more on the way.

UI: A Fresh, Modern Look

The Meshery UI receives a major refresh with the adoption of the Sistent design system and an in-progress migration to Material UI v5.

Enhanced User Experience: Enjoy a more intuitive and visually appealing interface.
New Components: Leverage a wide range of new components from the Sistent design system.

CLI: Increased Coverage and Functionality

The Meshery CLI boasts increased code coverage and a full deprecation of Apps and migration to Designs as well as dedicated commands for managing models, relationships, components, connections, credentials, and policies. See all the CLI commands in the Meshery documentation.

Docs

A whole new set of Meshery tutorials are available in this release:

Playground, Build, Test, Release: Improved Processes

End-to-End Testing: Increased focus on end-to-end testing with a goal of 50% coverage.
Playwright Adoption: Transitioning from Cypress to Playwright for more robust testing.
Automated Test Results: Stay informed with automatically published end-to-end test results.
Playground move to Kubernetes: From single Docker host to single node Kubernetes cluster, the Meshery Playground now offers interactive, cloud native tutorials within with hands-on learning experiences running on Kubernetes.

Join the Meshery Community!

We invite you to explore and experience the future of collaborative cloud native management. Join us on Slack to connect with the community, share your feedback, and contribute to the project.

As a community, we’ve been fortunate to welcome new Meshery Maintainers, Sangram Rath and Matthieu Evrin, and Yash Sharma. We are grateful for their stewardship and look forward to their continued pathpaving in our next release.

Get Involved!

We welcome your contributions to Meshery! Please join our weekly newcomers meeting for a guided tour of how to get involved.

If these topics excite you, come and say “Hi” in the community Slack and you are sure to be warmly welcomed. 😀

Thank You!

A big thank you to all of the contributors who made this release possible! We are grateful for your continued support of the Meshery project.

Looking Ahead and onto v0.9

While v0.8.0 delivers significant advancements, we’re already working on v0.9.0!

We are already hard at work on v0.9.0 Roadmap! See v0.9.0 Milestone in meshery/meshery for more details and the Meshery Architecture deck for additional visual designs and functional specifications. Stay tuned for more updates.

Adapters & Performance Management: Evolving meshes.proto to adapters.proto and externalizing Nighthawk for improved performance testing.
Basic Adaptive Load Controller: Introducing adaptive testing capabilities for more dynamic performance analysis.
Custom Telemetry Provider: Enabling user-defined dashboards and metrics for greater flexibility.

Roadmap Details

Adapters & Performance Management

Evolve meshes.proto to adapters.proto
Externalize Nighthawk (spec)
Nighthawk as a Meshery Adapter (`meshery-nighthawk`)
Server: Lifecycle Management of `meshery-nighthawk` in Meshery Server
CLI: `mesheryctl perf` support for load generator / adapter selection
UI: `meshery-nighthawk` adapter chip

Basic Adaptive Load Controller

**Basic Adaptive Load Controller** ([spec](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1arewKYZuhkv7NGRZKx0w-7bQdS-ho-YSYJF0X32qfHo/edit#slide=id.gfbc0c4fb3f_0_8)) (_v0.9.0_)

Exposure of “Adaptive Test” in Meshery UI.
Meshery Server endpoints.
Storage of n result sets in Provider for a given Performance Profile.

Custom Telemetry Provider

Multiple Telemetry Providers and Custom Boards (spec)
User-defined Dashboards and Metrics (spec)

Dive deeper into the details and explore the full list of changes in the Meshery Documentation. Stay tuned for updates on v0.9.0!

Try v0.8.0 in the Meshery Playground or download the latest release to get started. We look forward to your feedback and contributions!