What’s new at Tailwarden: August 2023

Welcome everyone to the August 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

We're excited to share some of the amazing features and improvements we introduced to Komiser in August, thanks to the valuable feedback from our contributors and users. We've worked hard to make Komiser an even better tool to bring transparency back to cloud providers, and we hope you'll find these updates as exciting as we do!

• As usual, we've taken a significant step towards offering a more in-depth perspective on AWS services by supporting new AWS services like ELB and IAM resources.
• We've also been working on introducing an onboarding wizard to simplify the integration of cloud accounts to Komiser. This feature is in its final phase and will be released in the coming days, thanks to the contributions of Shubham, Philip, and Seyi.

• We've also been working on the dependency graph feature, which allows you to explore the connections between your cloud resources and how they're related to each other. This can help you identify security attack surfaces and pinpoint idle resources, further enhancing your infrastructure optimization and security. This feature will also be released in the coming days, thanks to the contributions of Avinesh, Pranav, and Alex.
• We've also started migrating our official documentation from Docusuarus to Mintlify to improve the user interface and content discovery.
• Finally, we've introduced a new feature for collecting feedback from Komiser users. This will help us improve the product experience, and we're currently looking for new contributors to work on this feature. If you're interested, you can join our Komiser Maintainer Program.

Kudos to our community heroes of the month: Seyi, Avinesh, Philip, Shubham, Kunal, Manogna, Erik, Pranav, Pavan 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 joining our Komiser Weekly meetings. Feel free to check out our contributor guidelines.

Tailwarden

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.

• New Dashboard: Gain a unified view across all your connected cloud accounts. Our new dashboard provides insights on Cloud Map (to identify active resources), Tag Coverage, and an Advanced Cost Explorer for in-depth cost analysis.
• Inventory & Custom Views Enhancement: Enhance your resource management with our improved workflow for filtering cloud resources and building custom views.
• Cost Explorer Widget: Now includes a cost breakdown by resource name, enabling you to track the evolution of your cloud cost at the resource level, providing more detailed and actionable insights.
• Direct Cloud Resource Access: Eliminate the need for toggling between tabs by accessing your cloud resources directly on the cloud provider console from Tailwarden.
• Cloud Permissions Clarification: Never be in the dark about missing cloud permissions. They are now clearly displayed in the relevant cloud account panel, making troubleshooting a breeze.
• Unified Settings: We have merged both the user and workspace settings into one global settings section

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 supporting AWS on the Komiser dependency graph and shipping the new onboarding wizard in General Availability (GA).
• Adding support for GCP per-resource costs and providing more cost insights for GCP customers.
• Introducing a tags audit feature with compliance insights through daily email digests.
• Launching a new Komiser landing page and documentation.

Community news & updates:

We hosted several events this month. Firstly, we hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, featuring open-source and cloud experts who shared invaluable tips with our community. In August, we were thrilled to host Sandro Volpicella, Engineering lead at Hashnode and co-author of the book AWS Fundamentals who shared about his latest book, career path, and latest trends in Serverless. If you couldn't attend the event, we invite you to watch the recording here:

In addition, we hosted our 11th 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:

Furthermore, Jake our community developer was a guest on the Kubesimplify workshop on Twitch, where he showcased Komiser live and how to use it to track the cost and usage of an AWS application:

Lastly, we hosted our 4th 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).

Check out our latest blog posts:

• Discovering Idle Multi-Cloud Resources with Tailwarden: Not using a cloud resource doesn't mean they're free. In the cloud world, use tools that make it easy to avoid paying for unused resources.
• Overcoming Anchoring Bias in Cloud Cost Management: If you base your decisions on the first information you were presented with you might fall into the anchoring bias trap. A lot is riding on your not falling for it.
• The role of a Product Designer in early-stage Saas startups: Before joining an early-stage startup as a designer, it's crucial to understand the role's challenges, which could affect the company's growth trajectory.
• Cloud Cost Monitoring using Komiser: A blog post written by our community member Manogna based on the Kubesimplify workshop.

And that’s all we have for the August 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.