Starting from scratch
Welcome to Kanvas, your comprehensive tool for creating and managing cloud native deployment designs. This documentation will guide you through the steps, emphasizing the underlying system behavior for each action you take.
Getting Started with Designs
Learn how to create, import, and share cloud native infrastructure designs in Kanvas — from your first design to deployable architecture.
Categories:
Follow Along with Jordan and Five
Throughout the Kanvas docs, you’ll follow Jordan Reyes — a developer and designer at Orbital Labs — as she creates, shares, and iterates on infrastructure designs. Five reviews her work and occasionally discovers that a design works better in practice than it does in theory. Their starting point is themicroservices-baseline design in the orbital-dev workspace. Meet the full cast →Start here 🔗
- Starting from scratch — open Designer and create your first design.
- Importing a Design — bring in Kubernetes, Helm, Compose, or existing Meshery designs.
- Working with Components — configure, copy, and arrange components on the canvas.
- Creating Relationships — connect components with context-aware edges.
Choose Designer when you are authoring infrastructure; switch to Operator when you are inspecting live clusters. See the Kanvas overview for the mode chooser.
Use Kanvas for your diagrams 🔗
Dev Env Documentation
The dev environment is an often overlooked but critical part of an organization’s infrastructure. Knowing what clusters and services are used, how to run and test services locally, and how to troubleshoot are critical parts for getting a team up and running quickly. With Kanvas, you can easily embed designs into your How To and Getting Started guides, making it easy to create, maintain and update concise documentation.
Migrations and Rollbacks
Migrations and rollbacks are some of the most important things to get right when they’re needed. By making it easy to create, find, and reference these documents and diagrams, you can be confident that your processes will be understood and your knowledge up to date.
Deployment Pipeline
Kanvas keyboard shortcuts and preset icons make it easy to create beautiful, informative designs that explain every aspect of your deploy, test, and monitor pipeline. Embed several designs in one document to cover all of your different services, vendors, and data stores.
Importing a Design
Learn how to import designs from various sources and formats, including Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, Docker Compose files, and more.
Creating Relationships
Relationships identify and facilitate genealogy between Components.
Working with Components
Meshery Components are reusable, interactive elements that can be used to build your designs. Learn how to work with components.
Related Reading
- Canvas Actions
- Cloning a Design
- Configuring Components
- Creating Relationships
- Deleting a Design
- Deploying Designs
Recent Discussions on Kanvas
- Jul 12 | Unleash Visual Power: Import Your Configs by zihan kuang
- Oct 14 | Explore Meshery's Published Relationship Design Examples by Awani Alero
- Oct 03 | Design Review RFC: Kanvas Empty State Enhancement by Lee Calcote
- Jul 19 | [For Discussion] Visual indication of semantically vs non-semantically meaningful Meshery components by Lee Calcote
- Jun 07 | What are the conditions for a "System is unhealthy" warning? by James
- May 30 | Looking for a meshmate to help with first PR by Faisal Imtiyaz123
- Feb 28 | For Discussion: Capturing potential, but unrealized Relationships in Design Snapshots by Lee Calcote
- Feb 12 | Hint on Scaling & Verifying Cronjob in Playground by Sandra Ashipala