What’s new at Tailwarden: May 2023

Welcome everyone to the May 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 May, 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're introducing webhooks at the views level to incentivize developers on cost and cloud usage, thereby bringing accountability to cloud spending. The aim is to make it easy for developers to integrate these webhook alerts into their existing systems with minimal effort.
• We've expanded Komiser's support for new cloud services within existing cloud providers: AWS Kinesis shards, RDS proxy endpoints & snapshots, EC2 VPC peering connections, Azure snapshots, and firewalls.
• We've also shipped cost insights for GCP VMs and EC2 RDS

Kudos to our community heroes of the month, Fabian, Shubham, TheHamkerCat, Siddarth, naisayer, Annu, and Philip for their valuable contributions to Komiser.

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 testing existing and new features. Feel free to check out our contributor guidelines.

We've also rolled out new features for the cloud version of Tailwarden, including the support for custom views. These 'virtual windows' allow developers to view filtered lists of resources in their cloud infrastructure.

To smooth the initial journey for new users, we've introduced an enhanced onboarding workflow. This allows newcomers to familiarize themselves with the platform by populating their workspace with onboarding data before connecting their infrastructure. Additionally, we've refined our credentials validation system to simplify the troubleshooting of connection issues.

We have expanded our support for resources from all major cloud providers, including:

• Microsoft Azure: Now supports VMs, Disks, SQL, and Queues.
• Google Cloud Platform: Offers support for VMs, BigQuery tables, KMS, IAM roles, and Redis instances.
• DigitalOcean: Now integrated with support for Droplets, Volumes, Load balancers, Databases, Kubernetes clusters, VPCs, and Firewalls.
• Amazon Web Services: We've added support for MSK clusters, Glue jobs, EFS resources, DMS replication tasks, OpenSearch domains, Kinesis shards, SageMaker pipelines, and EC2 ELB.

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

In the coming weeks, our focus will be on:

• Implementing an onboarding wizard in Komiser to improve cloud accounts management.
• Adding support for AWS cross-account roles in Tailwarden, providing a more secure connection method.
• Delivering additional insights on cost, security, and compliance to help optimize your cloud infrastructure.
• 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 third “Wardens Assembly” workshop, where Maria Ashby from Kubeshop, showcasing the power of Botkube - the open-source tool that combines Kubernetes and ChatOps. 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 May, we were thrilled to host Viktor Farcic, who shared insights on the CNCF ecosystem, DAPR, the impact of AI on jobs, and the future of DevOps. Plus, he shared tips for developers and discussed how to create engaging content. If you couldn't attend the event, we invite you to watch the recording here:

In addition, we hosted our 9th 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 first 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.

Check out our latest blog posts:

• Build a CI/CD Pipeline for a Serverless Application: In this 2nd part, we’re building a CI/CD pipeline using the 'Pipeline as Code' approach, with our sights set on Lambda-based applications.
• Deploy a Jenkins Cluster on AWS with Terraform and Packer: Learn how to build a Jenkins cluster on AWS with Terraform and Packer, and how to build a CI/CD pipeline for a Serverless app on top of it.

And that’s all we have for the May 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 in the loop of all of the latest updates

Regardless if you are a Developer, DevOps, or Cloud engineer. Dealing with the cloud can be tough at times, especially on your own. If you are using Tailwarden or Komiser and want to share your thoughts doubts and insights with other cloud practitioners feel free to join our Tailwarden discord server. Where you will find tips, community calls, and much more.