Add news article on Meshery's 6th highest-velocity ranking and update Layer5 Academy comparison images

Signed-off-by: Lee Calcote <lee.calcote@layer5.io>

Author: leecalcote

src/collections/news/2025/2025-11-05-sixth-highest-velocity/index.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,111 @@
+---
+title: "Meshery Ranks 6th Highest-Velocity Project in CNCF, Announces Major Governance Shift"
+subtitle: "Enabling teams to collaboratively design, deploy, and manage cloud native infrastructure without finger-pointing"
+date: 2025-11-05 08:00:00 -0530
+author: The Newsroom
+thumbnail: ./sixth-highest-velocity-project-out-of-237-CNCF-projects.png
+darkthumbnail: ./sixth-highest-velocity-project-out-of-237-CNCF-projects.png
+category: "Press Release"
+description: "Riding top-tier CNCF velocity, Meshery unveils a new, expanded project structure at KubeCon to accelerate its 300+ community-driven integrations."
+tags:
+ - Announcements
+ - Meshery
+type: News
+presskit: ""
+resource: false
+published: true
+---
+import { Link } from "gatsby";
+// import MesheryExtensionsDark from "./meshery-extensions-github-dark.png";
+import MesheryExtensionsLight from "./meshery-extensions-github-light.png";
+import { NewsWrapper } from "../../News.style.js";
+import Blockquote from "../../../../reusecore/Blockquote";
+import BlockquoteAlt from "../../../../reusecore/Blockquote/Blockquote-alt-style";
+
+<NewsWrapper>
+
+[Austin, TX] [KubeCon + CloudNativeCon] - November 5th, 2025 –- <a href="/meshery">Meshery</a>, the extensible cloud native management platform, today announced that it has achieved the status of the sixth highest-velocity project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a significant acceleration considering its Sandbox maturity level and position among 237 CNCF projects. This news precedes Meshery’s robust presence at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta.
+
+## The Rocket Ship: Surging Velocity and Community Growth
+
+Meshery’s climb to the 6th highest-velocity project marks a rapid progression, jumping three ranks since its 9th-place announcement in April 2025. This trajectory reflects consistent growth, improving steadily from 33rd highest velocity in 2020-2021 to 6th by July 2025.
+
+<BlockquoteAlt
+  quote="These achievements underscore the dedication of our global community and Meshery's growing impact in the cloud native ecosystem."
+  person="Sangram Rath"
+  title="Meshery Maintainer"
+/>
+
+These achievements underscore the dedication of our global community and Meshery's growing impact in the cloud native ecosystem.
+
+This momentum is sustained by Meshery’s expanding global community, which now boasts more than 10,000 members. Over the past year, the project has seen a 350% increase in code commits, contributions from over 3,000 open source contributors, and has surpassed 10,000 GitHub stars.
+
+Meshery empowers DevOps, Platform, SRE, and Application teams by providing collaborative GitOps, distributed performance management, and a visual designer for deployments, simplifying cloud native infrastructure management and accelerating learning and experimentation across CNCF projects.
+
+## The Meshery Umbrella Expands: Strategic Partitioning for Scale
+
+Driven by this high project velocity and growing complexity, Meshery maintainers have implemented a <a href="https://meshery.io/blog/2025/meshery-ecosystem-expansion">critical revision to its governance and organizational structure</a>: the partitioning of its repositories into two distinct GitHub organizations. This strategic move aims to enhance modularity, scalability, and community engagement.
+
+<p><a href={MesheryExtensions}><img src={KanvasScreenshot} alt="This restructuring comes as Meshery celebrates a milestone of unprecedented growth." width="100%" className="block-display align-center" /></a><br />This restructuring comes as Meshery celebrates a milestone of unprecedented growth.</p>
+
+
+
+The new structure divides the ecosystem into:
+
+1. github.com/meshery: Dedicated to the core platform and foundational projects, including critical components like Meshery Operator and MeshSync. The core Meshery maintainers govern this organization, ensuring stability and alignment with CNCF standards.
+2. github.com/meshery-extensions: A dedicated, community-centric space for extensions, integrations, and tooling. This organization fosters community ownership, allows for rapid iteration on independent release cycles, and acts as an incubator for new ideas and less common cloud service providers.
+
+<Blockquote 
+  quote="This new structure isn't just a response to our success; it's our strategy for scaling it."
+  person="Lee Calcote"
+  title="Meshery Maintainer"
+/>
+
+"This incredible growth to the #6 highest velocity project in the CNCF is a testament to our amazing community," said Lee Calcote, Meshery maintainer. "This new structure isn't just a response to our success; it's our strategy for scaling it. By partitioning into core and extensions, we are empowering our community to innovate faster than ever while ensuring a stable, robust platform for the enterprise."
+
+This scalable structure currently <a href="https://meshery.io/integrations">supports over 300 out-of-the-box integrations</a> with Cloud and cloud nativ infrastructure, enabling seamless lifecycle, configuration, and performance management across multi-cluster and multi-cloud environments. This approach draws inspiration from successful, graduated CNCF projects for clear core vs. extensions distinction, team autonomy, and a working group-like model for governance.
+
+## A Commitment to Mentorship and Inclusion
+
+Meshery’s success is deeply rooted in its vibrant and inclusive community, evidenced by its leading role in mentorship programs:
+
+- #1 Most Popular Internship in the Linux Foundation: Meshery is the top choice for aspiring developers in the Linux Foundation’s LFX Mentorship program, offering hands-on projects in areas like cloud service model relationships and end-to-end testing across Spring, Summer, and Fall terms.
+- Marquee Project in Google Summer of Code (GSoC): As a flagship participant in GSoC, Meshery provides mentees with opportunities to tackle real-world challenges in distributed systems, with projects for 2025 including support for Azure, shared workspaces, and kubectl plugins.
+
+These initiatives embody a pay-it-forward mentality, where maintainers and MeshMates actively guide newcomers.
+
+<BlockquoteAlt 
+  quote="I've consistently been impressed by the top-tier cloud native talent coming from the Meshery community. It's clear that their focus on real-world challenges through programs like LFX Mentorship and GSoC isn't just building a high-velocity tool—it's building high-velocity engineers ready to solve complex problems from day one."
+  person="Marcus Blom"
+  title="Senior Technical Recruiter at Amazon Web Services (AWS)"
+/>
+
+## Join Meshery at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025
+
+The Meshery project invites the community to <Link to="/community/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america-2025">join its maintainers at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025</Link> in Atlanta from November 10th to 13th. Key sessions include:
+
+- Project Lightning Talk: Beyond YAML: Visualizing Kubernetes Ontologies With Meshery
+  Attendees will learn how Meshery's intuitive visual interface, Kanvas, reduces cognitive load by aligning with users' mental models, making Kubernetes configuration less daunting.
+  Date: November 10, 2025, 1:52 am - 1:57 pm EST
+
+- Session: "Do You Even Merge?" - Welcome To Maintainers Life, Please Bring Snacks and Boundaries
+  This talk will share the human side of maintaining high-velocity CNCF projects, discussing how the team manages growth, prioritizes responsibilities, and uses governance structures like SIGs to scale.
+  Date: November 12, 2025, 11:00 am - 11:30 am EST
+
+- Contribfest: Dive Deep Into Extending Cloud Native Management with Meshery
+This in-depth, hands-on session allows participants to understand and create Meshery Models - a blueprint characterizing managed resources and their relationships, enabling consistent infrastructure and workload deployment, management, and automation. No prior experience is needed.
+Date: November 13th, 2025, 1:45 pm - 3:00 pm EST
+
+Meshery invites developers, operators, and enthusiasts to try Meshery from the convenience of their web browser today at https://play.meshery.io and be part of the movement that is redefining cloud native management.
+
+#### About Meshery
+
+Meshery is the open-source cloud-native manager and extensible engineering platform that enables collaborative cloud native management. It accelerates learning and experimentation, empowering users to seamlessly handle lifecycle, configuration, and performance management across multi-cluster and multi-cloud environments. <a href="https://meshery.io">Meshery</a> is a project hosted under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
+
+
+##### About Layer5, Inc.
+<p style="font-size:1rem">
+Our open source and commercial products empower organizations to embrace the power of cloud native with confidence. Layer5's mission is to simplify the adoption and operation of cloud native infrastructure, enabling organizations to innovate faster and engineers to do so collaboratively. 
+Layer5’s award-winning open source community has over 10,000 members. For more information, visit <Link to="/">https://layer5.io</Link></p>
+
+</NewsWrapper>

src/collections/news/2025/2025-11-05-sixth-highest-velocity/meshery-extensions-github-dark.png

@@ -2,8 +2,8 @@
 title: Layer5 Academy vs Moocit
 subtitle: Academy Comparison
 date: 2025-08-18 08:00:00 -0530
-thumbnail: ./academy.svg
-darkthumbnail: ./academy.svg
+thumbnail: ../../../assets/images/academy/academy-layer5-light.png
+darkthumbnail: ../../../assets/images/academy/academy-layer5.png
 description: "Layer5 Academy vs Moocit Comaprision"
 type: Comparison
 category: Academy