As a high velocity project and one of the fastest-growing projects in the CNCF ecosystem, Meshery’s increasing scale and community contributions necessitates this recognition, which requires a revision to its governance and organizational structure that better aligns with the scale of its growing complexity and community contributions. To best serve its expansive ecosystem, Meshery maintainers have opted to partition the numerous GitHub repositories into two distinct organizations: github.com/meshery for the core platform and github.com/meshery-extensions for extensions and integrations.
This post explains the rationale behind the shift, outlining the proposed governance structure, setting expectations around support, and describing project mechanics, drawing inspiration from other successful CNCF projects.
Rationale for Repository Partitioning
The decision to partition repositories aims to improve project structure, manageability, scalability, and community engagement.
Project architecture
Meshery is a highly extensible, self-service management platform. Every feature is developed with extensibility in mind, as is evident by the ubiquity of extension points throughout Meshery’s architecture.
Modularity and focus
Separating the core platform from extensions allows the Meshery core team to concentrate on maintaining and enhancing the primary platform, which includes critical components like Meshery Operator and MeshSync. Extensions, such as adapters for specific cloud native technologies, can be developed and maintained independently by community contributors or specialized teams. This modularity ensures that the core platform remains robust and focused.
Project scalability
With support for over 300 integrations and counting, managing everything under one GitHub organization has become impractical. A separate organization for extensions simplifies permission management, contribution processes, and release cycles, making the ecosystem more scalable.
- Community ownership and maintenance: Projects within meshery-extensions are generally initiated, developed, and maintained by members of the community, rather than the core maintainers. This allows the ecosystem to scale beyond what the core team can directly support.
- Clearer support expectations: Distinguishing between the core and extensions makes it clear that projects in meshery-extensions have different maintenance levels, release cadences, and support guarantees compared to the core components. This clarifies that users are relying on community support for these specific integrations.
Community engagement
By providing a dedicated space for extensions, Meshery encourages community contributions, as developers can create and maintain extensions without needing deep involvement in the core platform’s development. With this approach, meshery-extensions fosters a vibrant ecosystem around Meshery by providing a designated, community-centric space for extensions, integrations, and tooling, keeping the core project focused and manageable while enabling broad community participation.
- Incubation and experimentation: The separate organization acts as an incubator for new ideas, providers, or tooling related to Meshery. Projects can start here and, if they gain significant traction and stability, will be considered for migration or closer integration with the core project.
- Ecosystem growth: Part of Meshery’s power lies in its ability to manage any infrastructure via Providers, Models, Adapters, and its other extension points. Since there are countless APIs and services, meshery-extensions serves as the place where the community can build and share Providers for less common cloud services, specific SaaS platforms, or even internal company APIs, without needing official endorsement or maintenance from the core maintainers.
Governance Structure
The new structure allows for different governance models and maintainer structures for community projects compared to the core project. Meshery can adopt a governance model that balances control over the core platform with flexibility for extensions, drawing from its existing governance and the Kubernetes’ SIG model.
Core Platform (github.com/meshery)
- Governance: Governed by the core Meshery maintainers, as outlined in the project’s governance document. Roles include contributors, organization members, and maintainers, with clear processes for becoming a maintainer (e.g., nomination, voting by existing maintainers).
- Responsibilities: Maintainers review, approve, and merge pull requests, manage releases, and ensure the platform’s stability and alignment with CNCF standards.
- Decision-making: Decisions are made through consensus among maintainers, with regular meetings and transparent communication via Slack and community forums.
Extensions (github.com/meshery-extensions)
- Governance: Each extension may have its own maintainers and a lighter governance structure to encourage innovation. A review process by the core team ensures extensions meet quality and compatibility standards.
- Maintainer selection: Extension maintainers can be nominated by community members or self-nominated, with approval from the core team based on contribution history and technical expertise.
- Autonomy: Extension teams have autonomy over their development processes, provided they adhere to Meshery’s code of conduct and integration guidelines.
Oversight and Coordination
- Steering committee: A steering committee, composed of core maintainers and representatives from active extension teams, oversees cross-organization alignment, resolves conflicts, and approves new extensions.
- Transparency: Both organizations maintain open communication with public meeting minutes, discussion forums, and regular updates to the community.
| Aspect | Core Platform | Extensions |
| Governance | Structured, led by core maintainers | Flexible, per-extension maintainers |
| Maintainer Selection | Nomination, 2/3rds majority vote | Nomination, core team approval |
| Decision-Making | Consensus among maintainers | Extension team consensus, core oversight |
| Communication | Public meetings, Slack, forums | Public issues, Slack, optional meetings |
Delineated support expectations
Support expectations differ between the core platform and extensions to reflect their distinct roles and maintenance models.
Core platform
- Full support: The core team provides regular updates, bug fixes, and feature enhancements, ensuring stability for critical components like Meshery Operator and MeshSync.
- Documentation: Comprehensive guides, such as installation instructions and CLI usage, are maintained (Meshery Documentation).
- Community support: Active engagement through Slack, forums, and weekly newcomer meetings to support users and contributors.
Extensions
- Variable support: Core team-maintained extensions receive robust support, while community-maintained ones may have limited support.
- Clear labeling: Documentation should indicate the support level (e.g., “Official” vs. “Community”) for each extension.
- Integration support: The core platform provides stable APIs and extension points, ensuring compatibility, with guidelines for developers (Meshery Extensions).
Project mechanics
Managing two organizations involves distinct development, testing, and integration processes to ensure a cohesive ecosystem.
Development process
- Platform: Follows a structured release cycle with stable and edge channels. Changes undergo rigorous review to sustain stability. Notify platform extenders and system integrators of upcoming changes in the underlying framework to ensure time is afforded to maintain compatibility.
- Extensions: Operate on independent release cycles, allowing rapid iteration. Developers use Meshery’s extension points to integrate with the core platform, following contribution guidelines.
Integration testing
- Compatibility testing: Extensions are tested against multiple core platform versions to deliver compatibility, using guidance for verifying compatibility between core platform and extensions.
- Automated pipelines: GitHub Actions automate testing and snapshot generation, as seen in extensions like Helm Kanvas Snapshot.
- Performance testing: Meshery’s performance management features can be used to benchmark extensions, ensuring they meet efficiency standards.
Documentation and resources
- Comprehensive guides: Documentation covers core platform usage, extension development, and integration (Meshery Docs). The Newcomers’ Guide and MeshMates program aid onboarding (Meshery Community).
- Catalog and templates: Meshery’s catalog of design templates includes extension configurations, and promoting best practices (Meshery Catalog).
- Community resources: Weekly meetings, Slack channels, and the community handbook provide ongoing support.
Reflections on other projects
Meshery’s expansion strategy draws inspiration from successful models within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), like Argo, Crossplane, and Kubernetes. These projects demonstrate effective approaches to decentralized governance and focused development through the separation of core and community-contributed components.
Meshery aims to emulate Crossplane’s model of maintaining a clear distinction between its core platform (github.com/crossplane) and community contributions (github.com/crossplane-contrib). This separation allows third-party developers to extend Crossplane’s capabilities without affecting the core’s stability, a model that supports Meshery’s approach to fostering innovation while maintaining a reliable core.
Similarly, Meshery Extension teams operate with autonomy over their development processes, provided they adhere to Meshery’s core component frameworks and integration guidelines. This mirrors Argo’s model (github.com/argoproj-labs), where projects function independently but align with broader project goals.
Kubernetes provides a robust model for decentralized governance through its use of github.com/kubernetes for core components and github.com/kubernetes-sigs for Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Each SIG acts as a mini-community with its own charter, leadership, and processes, all while aligning with overarching project goals, as outlined in theKubernetes Governance. Meshery’s extension organization can adopt a similar structure, enabling extension teams to operate autonomously within defined guidelines.
Meshery umbrella expands
See the current list of repositories under each organization: meshery org repos and meshery-extensions org repos.
By partitioning repositories into github.com/meshery andgithub.com/meshery-extensions, Meshery is taking a strategic step towards the overarching goal of improved modularity, scalability, and community engagement.
By adopting a governance structure that balances control and flexibility, delineating clear support expectations, and implementing robust project mechanics, Meshery can effectively manage its growing ecosystem. Drawing inspiration from graduated projects, Meshery is poised to remain a leading CNCF project—empowering collaborative cloud native management.