Getting Started

Go from sign-up to a shared organization and your first design in Layer5 Cloud.

Layer5 Cloud gives you a home for your designs and the people who work on them: an account, an organization that holds your teams, and workspaces that hold shared resources. You reach first value in three short tutorials. Sign up and you already have an organization, a team, and a workspace. Invite a teammate and give your team a workspace. Clone a design from the public catalog and you have something to work on.

The tenancy model in one table 🔗

Everything in Layer5 Cloud sits inside this structure. Your first sign-in creates one of each for you, so you never start from an empty account.

Object	What it is	How it relates	What you get by default
User	Your personal identity on Layer5 Cloud.	One user can belong to many organizations and teams.	Your account, plus the global Kanvas role.
Organization	The unit of tenancy. Membership in an organization decides who is in.	Owns its teams and workspaces. Every user belongs to at least one.	My Organization, owned by you, with the Organization Admin role.
Team	A named group of organization members.	Belongs to the organization it is created in. Can be assigned to several workspaces.	My Team, attached to My Organization, with the Team Admin role.
Workspace	A group of shared resources such as environments, connections, credentials, and designs.	Lives in one organization. Has zero or more teams. A design belongs to at most one workspace.	My Workspace, in My Organization, owned by you.

Tutorials 🔗

Work through these in order. Each one builds on the last.

Create Your Layer5 Account: sign up, verify your address, sign in, and confirm what Layer5 Cloud set up for you.
Set Up Your Organization: invite a teammate by email, create a team and a workspace, assign the team to the workspace, and move a design into it.
Start from a Catalog Design: browse the public catalog, try a design in the Playground, and clone it into your workspace as a private copy.

If you would rather start from your own repositories, GitHub integration imports Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, and Docker Compose files as designs.

Using Cloud with Meshery 🔗

Layer5 Cloud is a Remote Provider for Meshery. When you choose Layer5 Cloud as the provider in a Meshery Server, the server sends your browser to Layer5 Cloud to sign in, and Layer5 Cloud returns you to the server with a token. If your browser already holds a live Layer5 Cloud session, Layer5 Cloud skips the sign-in page and hands the token straight back. Layer5 Cloud returns tokens only to callback addresses it trusts and refuses all others.

A Meshery Server registers itself with Layer5 Cloud as a connection owned by the signed-in user. Registering the same server again updates that connection in place instead of creating a new one. Because every new account holds the Kanvas role, the Meshery Server receives the Kanvas extension capabilities when it connects with your account.

Architecture: how the sign-in handoff, trusted callbacks, and provider capabilities work.
Meshery Server registration: how a Meshery Server becomes a connection in your account.

Get help 🔗

If you run into issues during setup, join the Layer5 Slack community.