Proposal: Move all Meshery adapters, plugins, extensions to "extensions" org

[Lee Calcote]

Hi All,

In the past, Meshery has been referred to as a service mesh manager, however, that is only a small component of what Meshery does. Any longer, outside of its long list of service mesh-centric adapters, Meshery offers no special consideration to service meshes than it does the other 300+ technologies with which it integrates. 

While blog “Meshery is not a Service Mesh Manager" offers additional context, suffice to say that many people still perceive Meshery with a service mesh-centric connotation. This has long plagued the project, undercutting its much larger value offering to would-be users that otherwise skip past Meshery because of this misperception.While “service mesh” as a term has been stripped and replaced with “cloud native infrastructure” in nearly all aspects of the project, the fact that 12 of the 33 repositories in the project are service mesh-related doesn’t help.

Meshery extensions come in a number of different forms. Maintenance of Meshery adapters as a specific extension type have fallen to the wayside in the v0.7.x development timeframe with all of them currently being dysfunctional in one manner or another, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of users, who choose to deploy these optional extensions.

The “meshery” GitHub organization currently has 33 repositories. The proposed GitHub organization is https://github.com/meshery-extensions. Each of the following 15 considered extensions and are proposed to be transferred to be moved to the extensions organization:

1. meshery-cilium
2. meshery-istio
3. meshery-kuma
4. meshery-nginx-sm
5. meshery-consul
6. meshery-nighthawk
7. meshery-cpx
8. meshery-app-mesh
9. meshery-nsm
10. meshery-tanzu-sm
11. meshery-octarine
12. meshery-osm
13. helm-kanvas-snapshot
14. kubectl-kanvas-snapshot
15. kubectl-meshsync-snapshot

This organization and all of its repositories are to be donated to the CNCF; they are to be considered a direct part of the Meshery project, governed and stewarded in the same fashion that they are today, but as a separate organization, the hope is that:

1. Users will not see Meshery as service mesh-centric.

2. Contributors will see the greater opportunity (less daunting with a little more freedom) to extend Meshery as a platform with new adapters, plugins and so forth.

This should not disrupt Meshery’s standing at the 9th highest velocity in the CNCF as the same statistics should continue to be accounted for under the same project umbrella even though the project is proposed to be split across two orgs.

There are additional considerations to ponder and clarify under this proposed change, like whether all extensions should be kept in this separate organization, what criteria the project defines as extension adoption requirements (when someone/organization wants to donate a repo or requests that a new repo be created). There is soon to be a new section of the MAINTAINERS.md that identifies Meshery Extensions Maintainers.

Even though all considerations aren’t accounted for in this initial proposal, I wanted to set the discussion in motion and begin soliciting your input as assuming that there is enough support for this proposal, we will eventually put it to a vote.

Thank you for given this some thought. This will be a point of discussion in this week’s Meshery Development meeting. As you ponder this topic, here are two other project examples in which extensions are explicitly managed in orgs separate from the main project org: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs and https://github.com/crossplane-contrib.

Regards,

Lee

[Lee Calcote]

All, of the individuals that have offered feedback, their remarks have only been supportive of this suggestion. Given this, the following proposal is now posted for voting. 

Voting process:

All community members are welcome to show your support or lack thereof with a vote +1 (yea) or -1 (nay) to indicate your support or lack thereof and any comments. Please respond by 12pm Pacific on Wednesday, March 26th with your vote.

Community member and contributor votes are non-binding; e.g. "+1 non-binding". Existing maintainer votes are binding; e.g. "+1 binding"

Thanks,

Lee Calcote

Meshery Maintainer, Core

[Mia Grenell]

Hi All,

I voted just a bit earlier today, but received rejected messages from
the mailing lists, so I'm resending my vote as a mail forward in the
hopes that whatever caused my other message not to go through isn't an
issue now.

My vote: +1 binding

I understand the reasoning behind this proposal and I am all for it. I agree.

Best,
Mia

[Lee Calcote]

+1 binding

I recommend waiting until post-KubeCon EU to relocate the adapter repos (assuming this proposal passes vote).

- Lee

[Lee Calcote]

All,

For clarification, this is the proposal up for consideration and vote - https://groups.google.com/a/meshery.io/g/maintainers/c/ubfP8Byent8/m/wdGSO7XUBAAJ.

All are welcome to comment and cast a vote.

- Lee

On Tue, Mar 25, 2025 at 9:01 PM Lee Calcote via lists.cncf.io <lee.calcote=laye...@lists.cncf.io> wrote:

+1 binding

I recommend waiting until post-KubeCon EU to relocate the adapter repos (assuming this proposal passes vote).

- Lee

On Tuesday, March 25, 2025 at 5:28:14 PM UTC-5 Mia Grenell wrote:

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expect more from your infrastructure

[Sangram Rath]

+1 binding

[Falgun Patel]

+1 non-binding

[Aditya Raj]

+1 Non Binding 🚀

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[Daley Tinga]

+1 Non Binding

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[Yash Sharma]

+1 Binding

Best,

Yash

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[Ijeoma Eti]

+1 Binding

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[Tamaghna Chattopadhyay]

+1 non-binding.

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[Sudhanshu Dasgupta]

+1 Binding

- Sudhanshu

On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 3:23 PM Ajay Singh <ajaykripa...@gmail.com> wrote:

+1 Binding

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[Deepak Reddy]

+1  non-binding

I understand the reason why we are going to split meshery github org, even It can help in lot of ways . I totally agree upon on this.

- Deepak Reddy

[Deepak Reddy]

+1  non-binding

I understand the reason why we are going to split meshery github org, even It can help in lot of ways . I totally agree upon on this.

- Deepak Reddy

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[Yash Sharma]

+1 Binding

Best,

- Yash

[Be Smart]

+1 Binding 

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[Ajay Singh]

+1 Binding

On Wed, 26 Mar 2025, 15:13 Tamaghna Chattopadhyay, <chattopadh...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Yash Sharma]

+1 Binding

Regards,
Yash Sharma

[Khushi Bhaskar]

+1 Binding 

Regards,

Khushi Bhaskar

[Bhomik Jain]

+1 binding

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[abhinav sharma]

+1 Binding

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[Amit Jha]

+1

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[MAMIDISETTY SURESH KUMAR]

+1 binding 

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[Hariom Keshri]

+1 Binding

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[Matthieu EVRIN]

+1 binding

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[Chiranth Raju C]

+1

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[Prashant Mishra]

+1 binding

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[Gaganpreet Kaur Kalsi]

+1 non-binding

Looks good 🚀

Regards

Gaganpreet Kaur Kalsi

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[Nimesha Jinarajadasa]

Hey all

+1 Binding

On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 7:36 AM Mia Grenell <mia.gre...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

I voted just a bit earlier today, but received rejected messages from
the mailing lists, so I'm resending my vote as a mail forward in the
hopes that whatever caused my other message not to go through isn't an
issue now.

My vote: +1 binding

I understand the reasoning behind this proposal and I am all for it. I agree.

Best,
Mia

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[Kushal Agrawal]

+1

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[Hussaina Begum]

+1 binding 

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[Aadhitya A]

+1 binding 

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[Aarya Patil]

+1 binding

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[Himanshu Chauhan]

+1 Binding

On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 at 09:29, Mia Grenell <mia.gre...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

I voted just a bit earlier today, but received rejected messages from
the mailing lists, so I'm resending my vote as a mail forward in the
hopes that whatever caused my other message not to go through isn't an
issue now.

My vote: +1 binding

I understand the reasoning behind this proposal and I am all for it. I agree.

Best,
Mia

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[Vandana Maddi]

+1

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[Saurabh Singh]

+1 (Non-binding)

I believe this will be very beneficial for the contributors.

Regards

Saurabh K Singh

[Roshan Goswami]

+1 binding

On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 10:04 AM 'Lee Calcote' via Meshery Community <comm...@meshery.io> wrote:

+1 binding

I recommend waiting until post-KubeCon EU to relocate the adapter repos (assuming this proposal passes vote).

- Lee

On Tuesday, March 25, 2025 at 5:28:14 PM UTC-5 Mia Grenell wrote:

Hi All,

I voted just a bit earlier today, but received rejected messages from
the mailing lists, so I'm resending my vote as a mail forward in the
hopes that whatever caused my other message not to go through isn't an
issue now.

My vote: +1 binding

I understand the reasoning behind this proposal and I am all for it. I agree.

Best,
Mia

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Regard's

Roshan G Goswami

[Chinecherem Mba]

+1 binding

[Meet Jain]

 +1 binding

[Huang Xin]

+1 Binding

[Lee Calcote]

All,

Given the overwhelming support for the expansion of Meshery as a project into two GitHub organizations, work to split repos between the two organizations has been executed. 

Core Platform (github.com/meshery) repos:

1. .github
2. homebrew-tap
3. kompose (fork)
4. landscape2 (fork)
5. meet
6. meshery
7. meshery-adapter-library
8. meshery-operator
9. meshery.io
10. meshkit
11. meshsync
12. play
13. pvtr
14. repo-template
15. schemas
16. scoop-bucket
17. slack

Extensions (github.com/meshery-extensions) repos:

1. .github
2. helm-kanvas-snapshot
3. meshery-linkerd
4. meshery-app-mesh
5. meshery-consul
6. meshery-cilium
7. meshery-nsm
8. shape-builder
9. meshery-istio
10. meshery-nginx-sm
11. meshery-kuma
12. meshery-traefik-mesh
13. meshery-tanzu-sm
14. meshery-cpx
15. kubectl-kanvas-snapshot
16. kubectl-meshsync-snapshot
17. meshery-nighthawk
18. meshery-adapter-template
19. meshery-osm (archived)
20. meshery-octarine (archived)

This split is significant not only with Meshery as a project, but within the CNCF's collection of projects. A request is being sent to publish a post on the subject on cncf.io/blog.

In the meantime, a draft blog post has been made for meshery.io/blog and is available for your review here - The Meshery Umbrella Expands (https://github.com/meshery/meshery.io/pull/2139).

Please review prior to this coming Meshery Dev meeting. Barring any unaddressed review comments or concerns raised in the meeting, this post will be published and an announcement made. This is a significant project milestone, indeed.

Cheers,

Lee

On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 12:34 AM Lee Calcote <lee.c...@layer5.io> wrote:

Hi All,

In the past, Meshery has been referred to as a service mesh manager, however, that is only a small component of what Meshery does. Any longer, outside of its long list of service mesh-centric adapters, Meshery offers no special consideration to service meshes than it does the other 300+ technologies with which it integrates. 

While blog “Meshery is not a Service Mesh Manager" offers additional context, suffice to say that many people still perceive Meshery with a service mesh-centric connotation. This has long plagued the project, undercutting its much larger value offering to would-be users that otherwise skip past Meshery because of this misperception.While “service mesh” as a term has been stripped and replaced with “cloud native infrastructure” in nearly all aspects of the project, the fact that 12 of the 33 repositories in the project are service mesh-related doesn’t help.

Meshery extensions come in a number of different forms. Maintenance of Meshery adapters as a specific extension type have fallen to the wayside in the v0.7.x development timeframe with all of them currently being dysfunctional in one manner or another, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of users, who choose to deploy these optional extensions.

The “meshery” GitHub organization currently has 33 repositories. The proposed GitHub organization is https://github.com/meshery-extensions. Each of the following 15 considered extensions and are proposed to be transferred to be moved to the extensions organization:

1. meshery-cilium
2. meshery-istio
3. meshery-kuma
4. meshery-nginx-sm
5. meshery-consul
6. meshery-nighthawk
7. meshery-cpx
8. meshery-app-mesh
9. meshery-nsm
10. meshery-tanzu-sm
11. meshery-octarine
12. meshery-osm
13. helm-kanvas-snapshot
14. kubectl-kanvas-snapshot
15. kubectl-meshsync-snapshot

This organization and all of its repositories are to be donated to the CNCF; they are to be considered a direct part of the Meshery project, governed and stewarded in the same fashion that they are today, but as a separate organization, the hope is that:

1. Users will not see Meshery as service mesh-centric.

2. Contributors will see the greater opportunity (less daunting with a little more freedom) to extend Meshery as a platform with new adapters, plugins and so forth.

This should not disrupt Meshery’s standing at the 9th highest velocity in the CNCF as the same statistics should continue to be accounted for under the same project umbrella even though the project is proposed to be split across two orgs.

There are additional considerations to ponder and clarify under this proposed change, like whether all extensions should be kept in this separate organization, what criteria the project defines as extension adoption requirements (when someone/organization wants to donate a repo or requests that a new repo be created). There is soon to be a new section of the MAINTAINERS.md that identifies Meshery Extensions Maintainers.

Even though all considerations aren’t accounted for in this initial proposal, I wanted to set the discussion in motion and begin soliciting your input as assuming that there is enough support for this proposal, we will eventually put it to a vote.

Thank you for given this some thought. This will be a point of discussion in this week’s Meshery Development meeting. As you ponder this topic, here are two other project examples in which extensions are explicitly managed in orgs separate from the main project org: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs and https://github.com/crossplane-contrib.

Regards,

Lee