What’s new at Tailwarden: September 2023

Welcome everyone to the September 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

Komiser

This month, we launched the significant Komiser release v3.1.1, a culmination of 3 months of hard work by our tech team, maintainers and contributors:

• Onboarding wizard: Users can now integrate their cloud accounts with Komiser via a GUI, making the process more intuitive compared to the previous configuration file approach.
• Dependency graph: This allows exploration of the relationships between cloud resources, helping identify potential security risks and underused resources. This will enhance infrastructure optimization and fortify security.
• We've also integrated with OpenCost providing cost insights at Kubernetes resource level.

For an in-depth look at the September updates for Komiser, watch our video:

Kudos to our community heroes of the month: Pavan, Shobhit, Azan, Aswath, Swammy, Erik, Shubham, Philip, Siddarth, Bishal, Avinesh, Manish, Abhay, Shivam and Kunal for their valuable contributions to Komiser.

For those eager to contribute, the Komiser team is thrilled to announce our participation in Hacktoberfest this year. For fun tasks to tackle, visit the open issues labeled “hacktoberfest”.

Tailwarden

We've also rolled out new features for the cloud version aka 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.

• GCP per resource cost: Now, you can track the cost of your GCP resources at the resource level, all in one place, alongside AWS resources. This will give you a more granular view of your cloud costs and help you identify areas where you can save money.
• Advanced Cost Explorer: This feature allows for a deeper dive into cost analysis across AWS and GCP accounts. By excluding certain data points, it helps focus on pivotal cost drivers. Additionally, setting a personalized time range enables you to closely examine cost trends and spikes over your chosen period, assisting in meticulous budget management.
• In-app guidance: New members can now enjoy a seamless introduction to all the features Tailwarden has to offer, ensuring they get the most out of the platform from day one.
• Icon Support for Custom Views: Now, you can assign icons to your custom views. This will help in easily distinguishing them at a glance. Remember, custom views are your go-to place for creating dynamic lists of cloud resources based on specific filters.
• Tags audit: We've introduced a new widget at the dashboard level where you can analyze your tagging strategy and identify naming conventions issues and underutilized tags key/value pairs. You can also export the data as a CSV file for further analysis.
• Daily digests: We're now sending daily and weekly digests about your tagging strategy and AWS cost breakdown insights. This will help you stay on top of your cloud costs and take action to reduce them.

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

In the coming weeks, our focus will be on:

• Collecting additional cloud services dependencies to construct a comprehensive dependency graph.
• Improving the cloud resources fetching performance for Komiser CLI.
• Introducing custom view alerting for Tailwarden users.
• Launching brand new Komiser and Tailwarden landing pages.

Community news & updates:

This month was eventful. We hosted the Wardens Assembly virtual workshop, featuring a session by Otterize's head of Developer Advocacy, David G. Simmons. If you missed it, catch the replay:

We also celebrated the 12th Tailwarden Community Call. Here's the recording for those who couldn't join:

Our community developer, Jake, interviewed Joshua Oluwaseyi, our standout contributor for September. Watch their discussion:

Lastly, we hosted our 5th 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:

• Producing more hands-on tutorials and guides on how to use Komiser and Tailwarden.
• We’re hosting a Webinar with our friends at Civo on cloud cost optimization on November 15th.

Check out our latest blog posts:

• Bringing Transparency and Control to Cloud Spending: Explore how skyrocketing cloud costs have escalated to become a concern for board members and C-suite executives, and find out how Tailwarden can reduce your costs.
• How to convince your organization to adopt FinOps: Increase cost efficiency and innovation by persuading your organization to embrace FinOps practices. Elevate your financial game today.
• Hacktoberfest x Komiser - A simple guide for contributors: A Guide to meaningful participation in Hacktoberfest through contributing to the Komiser project. Beginner or experienced? Join us!

And that’s all we have for the September 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.