Continuing in our Meet the Maintainer series, we have Xin Huang. Xin is a maintainer of the Cloud Native Performance project. In this interview, we get to know Xin a little better and learn about his journey as an open source project maintainer and with Layer5 community.
Layer5 Team: Xin, thank you for joining me today. Many people inside and outside of the Layer5 Community have seen the effects of your contributions, but may not know the backstory as to who Xin is and how you arrived at your maintainer role. Indulge us. How did you discover the Layer5 community? What made you stay?
Xin: I’m working around Service Mesh Acceleration in Intel, and noticed the Service Mesh Performance project. So I attended the community meeting — the community is very active and welcoming and they hope for feedback and contribution from me. It’s the main reason that made me stay here and contribute continuously.
Layer5 Team: Have you worked with any other open source project? How does Layer5 community compare?
Xin: Yes, I’ve worked with some open source projects. Layer5 community knows how to cultivate and fulfill the spirit of open source. If you are a newcomer to open source, you can get a big leg up from the Layer5 community.
Layer5 Team: What is so fascinating about service meshes? Why are you focused on this technology specifically?
Xin: First, I’m working on Service Mesh Acceleration at Intel. Second, service mesh is a hot area — more and more people and enterprises are trying service mesh in production. Service Mesh is the bridge between developers and infrastructure; how fascinating it is to build something that benefits everyone.
Layer5 Team: Layer5 projects has a number of active, open source projects. You’ve been consistently contributing to a few of them. Which one(s) are you currently focusing on?
Xin: I’m focusing on the SMP (Service Mesh Performance) project because it’s closely related to my day job. I also use Meshery to manage our service mesh environment and demonstrate our acceleration efforts. Every project has its own specific goal — I can’t say which one is the “best”.
Layer5 Team: What is your favorite Meshery CLI command?
Xin:
Having worked on and used Meshery’s performance characterization features, I’m biased — I like mesheryctl perf the most.
Layer5 Team: Where do you see Cloud Native Performance, Nighthawk, and Meshery heading?
Xin: Meshery has a great vision: to manage all cloud and cloud-native technologies. It’s a fantastic idea for infrastructure and platform engineers who are overwhelmed by the explosion of projects.
Layer5 Team: Do you have any hot tip for working with Service Mesh Performance, Nighthawk, or Meshery that others may not know?
Xin: A very powerful feature is coming: Meshery will externalize Nighthawk as a first-class load generator with full lifecycle management. Nighthawk already supports adaptive load control, and with its plugin system we can feed custom metrics back into Meshery. In the future Meshery will even be able to auto-tune resiliency policies based on performance results. This amount of closed-loop intelligence is extremely exciting.
Layer5 Team: Do you have any advice for individuals hoping to become Layer5 contributors or even maintainers one day?
Xin: Be consistent, take ownership (even of boring tasks), help newcomers, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. The current maintainers have all earned their role through dedication — learn from them and respect their time. High-quality contributions, no matter the size, are what matter most.
Layer5 Team: In other words, aim for quality over quantity and enjoy the ride!
Xin: Exactly. And never forget to have fun while learning and collaborating with this incredibly diverse community.
The Meshery project moves at an impressive pace thanks to maintainers like Xin.
Be like Xin. Join the Layer5 Slack and say “hi”!
Team
