Exploring Designer

Designer mode is for those who want to create their own Kanvas, using the palette of components provided by Meshery.
Tags:
Categories:

Kanvas Designer is the visual canvas where you create, edit, and collaborate on cloud-native infrastructure designs. Using a drag-and-drop palette of components — from managed Kubernetes clusters and serverless functions to databases and object storage — you can model entire environments, annotate connections, and share living diagrams with your team, all without leaving your browser.

Kanvas Designer workspace with bottom dock, Layers panel, and Share controls
Designer workspace (anonymous capture, Sep 2026): bottom dock tools, Layers panel, and Layers / Comments / Actions / Share in the header. Chrome may differ slightly from older MeshMap-era screenshots elsewhere in these docs.

Five owns the api-platform-aws design in the orbital-production workspace and asked Jordan Reyes — the Orbital Labs team’s go-to designer — to build out the architecture. Jordan opens the design in Kanvas Designer, takes one look at the blank canvas, and gets to work.

She works from the component palette on the left, pulling in the services that will carry production traffic. An Amazon EKS cluster goes down first — the spine of the platform. Alongside it she places an AWS API Gateway to handle ingress, an AWS Lambda function for lightweight processing at the edge, an Amazon RDS instance configured for PostgreSQL, and an Amazon S3 bucket for object storage. Each component snaps into position as she arranges them across the canvas.

With the components placed, Jordan draws connections to model the data flow. API Gateway sits at the front, routing requests into Lambda. Lambda, in turn, calls back into the EKS cluster where the core services run. From EKS, two paths fan out: one to RDS for relational data, another to S3 for files and artifacts. The topology is legible at a glance — a quality Jordan treats as a design constraint, not a side effect.

She pauses at the RDS component and opens the comment panel to annotate the connection: “Primary read replica — do not connect to staging.” The note will be visible to anyone who opens the design, surfaced directly on the canvas without needing to hunt through external tickets or wikis.

Jordan shares the design with Rex Park, granting him reviewer access so he can inspect the layout and leave feedback without accidentally moving anything.

Rex opens api-platform-aws in Kanvas Designer and traces the connection paths Jordan laid out. He sees the Lambda-to-EKS link and adds his own comment on it: “Should Lambda connect directly to EKS or go through an internal ALB? Worth discussing before we deploy.” The comment pins to the connection, not to a chat thread.

Jordan sees the notification and comes back to the canvas. They hash it out in the comment thread, land on the ALB approach, and Jordan draws a new connection representing the internal Application Load Balancer sitting between Lambda and the cluster’s service mesh entry point. The design updates in place — no version-named duplicates, no stale exported images — and Rex can reload and see the revised architecture immediately.

Understanding Design Components

A complete reference for all components available in the Kanvas designer.

Understanding Edge Styles

Learn how to use and customize edge styles in Kanvas to create clear and meaningful designs.

Interpreting Component Badges

Learn to interpret component badges, the small visual indicators that provide at-a-glance information about a component’s status in both Designer and Operator modes.

Understanding Tool Modes

Kanvas Designer offers three modes: Default, Pencil, and Connector, which behave differently based on the context in which they are used. Learn how to interact with components and the canvas in each mode.

Whiteboarding

Whiteboarding and Freestyle Drawing inside Kanvas

Reviewing Designs

Learn how to leverage comments in Kanvas’s Designer Mode to enhance collaboration and streamline design reviews.

Sharing Designs

Share designs with other users and use access controls to manage design permissions and visibility.

Embedding Designs

How to embed your designs for sharing on your sites.

Working with Tags

Share design with other users and use control access to manage design access permissions and visibility.

Working with Canvas Objects

Add, copy, clone, lock, delete, style, reset and resize the shapes, sections, textboxes and components on your Kanvas Designer canvas.

Exporting Designs

How to export your designs for backup, sharing or offline use.

Publishing Designs

Learn to publish, manage, and work with designs in Meshery with clear state transitions, role-based permissions, and common workflow FAQs.

Pinning Models to the Dock

Learn how to pin and remove models from the dock in the Kanvas Designer for quick access.

Policy Engine

Choose how Kanvas evaluates relationships in your designs, understand the relationship indicator states, and diagnose failing or unexpected relationship results.

Canvas Actions

The canvas context menu - screenshots, the Help Center, keyboard shortcuts and canvas-wide editing actions.

Layout and Layers

Arrange the components in a design automatically, and choose which entities the canvas draws.

Merging and Loading Designs

Drag one design onto another to combine them, or open it in place of what is on the canvas.

Saving Designs

How Kanvas persists your work, what the save indicator is telling you, and how to save a copy.

Configuring Components

Edit a component’s configuration on the canvas, using the form Kanvas builds for it and its inline help.

Related Reading

Related Videos

Last modified September 27, 2026: [chore]: normalize taxonomies, update hugo.toml related setting and add taxonomy normalization to related-reading (f425262731c)