What’s new at Tailwarden: June 2023

Welcome everyone to the June edition of "What's new at Tailwarden." Join us as we go over our updates, community highlights, and everything related to Tailwarden. In this edition, you'll learn about all the new feature launches for this month.

Product updates

We're thrilled to share some of the amazing features and improvements we introduced to Komiser in June, all thanks to the valuable feedback from our contributors and users. We've worked hard to make Komiser an even better tool for managing and optimizing your cloud infrastructure, and we hope you'll find these updates as exciting as we do!

• We've taken a significant step towards offering a more in-depth perspective on AWS services by introducing AWS RDS snapshots and proxies collection. In an attempt to assist with cost management, we have enhanced the AWS CloudWatch and EC2 costs calculation.
• We've made improvements to the inventory search bar, ensuring more accurate results for efficient navigation and better resource tracking.
• In response to the feedback on UI consistency, we've matched the exclude component dropdown and bulk actions bar style with the original design. This adjustment aims to provide a more seamless user experience, promoting efficiency and ease of use.
• We're especially excited to announce the initial release of the dependency graph. You can now delve into your cloud resources connections, identify the security attack surface, and pinpoint idle resources, further enhancing your infrastructure optimization and security.
• We've made connecting cloud accounts to Komiser more effortless by introducing an onboarding wizard. Instead of dealing with a config file, users can now manage their cloud accounts through a native dashboard UI, offering a more intuitive, user-friendly process.

Kudos to our community heroes of the month: Alexandre,  Aiman, Michael, Naveen, Shobhit, Adeymi, Seyi, Akhay, Kumar, Annu, Mourad, Dipankar, Avinesh, Philip for their valuable contributions to Komiser. Also, congrats to Avinesh for being this month's contributor of the month:

To take part and potentially become the next Community Hero of the Month, consider contributing to our project, either by providing feedback, be it through GitHub, through the #feedback channel on our Discord server, or by joining our Komiser Weekly meetings. Feel free to check out our contributor guidelines.

We've also rolled out new features for the cloud version of Tailwarden. We've been listening to your feedback, and as a result, have implemented some fantastic new features and improvements to make your cloud management experience even better.

• AWS Cross-Account IAM Role: Now, connect your AWS infrastructure with our platform using a cross-account IAM Role by deploying a CloudFormation stack. This upgrade provides a smoother user experience and adheres to AWS's best security practices - Learn how
• AWS Per-Resource Cost: This feature enables you to monitor your AWS cloud resources costs. It's never been easier to track AWS costs per product, team, or application using filters and custom views. Learn more about how to utilize this feature  - Learn how
• Enhanced Tag Display: We've refined the way we display cloud resource tags. Virtual tags and provider tags are now highlighted separately, making it easier to manage your cloud resource tags and ensure that no resources remain untagged.
• Creation Date Filter: To give you better control over your cloud resources, we've added a creation date filter. This feature allows you to monitor resources based on their creation date, helping you track resources created within a certain timeframe (e.g., the past 7 days or the last 6 months) and identify whether they're still in use.
• Redesigned Cloud Accounts Page: We've revamped our cloud accounts page and streamlined the integration of cloud accounts within our platform.

We also shipped tons of other bug fixes and performance tuning. See the full changelog.

In the coming weeks, our focus will be on:

• Fully support AWS on Komiser dependency graph and ship new onboarding wizard in GA.
• Add support for GCP per-resource costs toprovide more cost insights for GCP customers.
• Further expanding support for AWS and GCP services and introducing support for OpenCost.

Community news & updates:

We hosted several events this month. Firstly, we hosted our 4th “Wardens Assembly” workshop, where Alex Jones from Canonical showcased the power of K8sGPT - an open-source tool for scanning your Kubernetes clusters, diagnosing and triaging issues in simple english. If you missed the event, you can watch the recording here:

Furthermore, we held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, featuring open-source and cloud experts who shared invaluable tips with our community. In June, we were thrilled to host Bill Mulligan, who shared tips about his career path and involvement with eBPF and Cilium projects. If you couldn't attend the event, we invite you to watch the recording here:

In addition, we hosted our 10th Tailwarden Community Call, which has become a monthly tradition for us. It was a great opportunity to share our milestones and challenges from the past weeks with our community. In case you missed it, re-watch it here:

Lastly, we hosted our 2nd contributors' office hours, presenting a fantastic opportunity to connect with fellow Komiser contributors, explore our roadmap and future plans, and learn about becoming a project maintainer. You can also get a glimpse of what our design team is working on.

In the coming weeks, our focus will be on:

• Produce more hands-on tutorials and guides on how to use Komiser and Tailwarden.
• Host virtual events on our Discord community with key tech figures (stay tuned).
• Cross-collaboration with DevOps communities such Kubesimplify.

Check out our latest blog posts:

• Monitoring a Next.js Application with Komiser: A step-by-step guide to deploying a Next.js application to AWS via Terraform and how to track the cloud resources every step of the way.
• Effective Design Feedback: 5 tips to empower your Design team: From offering constructive criticism to focusing on the user's perspective and respecting the design process, empower your team.
• Komiser introduces: Custom webhooks feature: Flexibility and seamless integration is key. With our custom webhook feature, you can send cost alerts to any platform or endpoint, ensuring no alert goes unnoticed.

And that’s all we have for the June edition. Thanks for reading through. For even more detailed announcements, be sure to check out the release notes and join us on Discord to stay updated on our more frequent updates.