What’s new at Tailwarden: January 2023

Welcome everyone to the first edition of 2023 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

This month has been an exciting one for the Tailwarden team as we've been hard at work releasing new features and expanding our support for cloud providers.

Komiser

We’ve introduced the cost filter to the inventory filtering sets. This feature allows developers to easily uncover expensive resources and track cost-driven ones. With the cost filter, you can ensure that even the most cost-intensive resources are not overlooked, giving you greater control and visibility over your cloud infrastructure and costs. Whether you're looking to optimize costs or monitor your environment, application, or team resources, the cost filter is a powerful feature that will help you stay on top of your expenses and make informed decisions.

A key aspect of FinOps is that every team member is responsible for their cloud usage. The calculation of the total cost of ownership requires transparency and accuracy, but unallocated shared costs obstruct these factors. If shared costs are not properly divided, engineers and product managers do not have a complete understanding of the actual cost of their apps. To improve visibility into shared resources such as databases, logging, k8s, enterprise support, etc., developers can now categorize shared resources and allocate budget, as well as create custom views that separate these shared resources from the rest of the team's views.

Komiser is a tool that works with multiple cloud providers, and this month, we have expanded our offerings thanks to the support of our community and contributors who have added new providers:

• Civo: A cloud-native service powered only by Kubernetes is now supported by Komiser. This integration was showcased at Civo webinar about cloud-cost optimization attended by over 500 people.
• Linode: For those who want a simpler and more predictable cloud solution, Linode might be the choice for you, offering basic core services without the billing surprises and complexity of providers like AWS. Komiser now covers Linode.
• Tencent Cloud: To better serve developers worldwide, we have added initial support for Tencent Cloud, the largest cloud provider in China.
• Kubernetes: With this integration, you have the ability to gather resources such as Pods and Services from multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Over the upcoming weeks, our focus will be on:

• Delivering customized dashboards that include cost analysis.
• Expanding our support to include Azure and GCP, as we aim to cater to a wider range of cloud providers.

Tailwarden

We also announced the release of our brand-new version of Tailwarden. This update has been a result of the last three months of development, incorporating feedback and suggestions from our valued users. This new version sets the foundation for some exciting new features, including:

• Expanded support to additional cloud providers, including Kubernetes.
• Customizable dashboards that can be tailored for teams and applications, with features like filtering and custom views.
• Improved productivity through automation, with features like Tagging and Audit Policies.
• Enhanced security measures, including Network and IAM analyzers.

Community news & updates:

We hosted our 5th Tailwarden Community Call, while this has become an end-of-month ritual for us, it's always great to share with our community our achievements and challenges over the past weeks.

In case you missed it, here's a short recap:

Kudos to our community heroes of the month: @fpapadamis, @nemca, and @piercypixel for their 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 or watch this hands-on demo on how to add a new resource to Komiser:

Check out our latest blog posts:

This month was packed, as we've created a lot of content about Komiser and how to use it to optimize costs and follow FinOps best practices. Our goal is to educate and empower developers to take control of their cloud infrastructure, and this month's content is a testament to that commitment. We're thrilled to share these resources with you, and we hope they help you get the most out of Komiser and Tailwarden:

This month was packed, we've released new features and supported new cloud providers.

• Tailwarden v2 Release: Introducing Tailwarden v2. This updated version has been in development for the past three months and results from feedback and input from our valued users.
• Cultivate a Cost-Conscious Culture with Komiser: Cultivating a cost-conscious culture is not hard when you have the right tools at hand. Use custom views to sort, manage and discover hidden cloud costs.
• Tagging Cloud Resources with Komiser: Komiser will help keep your tags organized and consistent over time. Learn how to use tags to optimize your cloud expenses and simplify your resource management.
• How to contribute to Komiser: Learn how to contribute to the open-source cloud resource manager, Komiser. Get hands-on experience & connect with a vibrant community of contributors.
• Komiser vs AWS Resource Explorer: Consider using Komiser, an open-source tool for natively discovering resources across multiple clouds, for your resource management needs.
• A practical guide to use and install Komiser: Want to take control of your cloud resources once and for all? Follow along to deploy Komiser in no time. Choose a deployment method and you are on your way!
• Uncomplicating cloud Security - Incident Response (Part 6): AWS incident response includes preparing for, identifying, triaging, and responding to security incidents. Have a plan and secure your business's future.
• Uncomplicating cloud Security - Data protection (Part 5): We all know how the poem goes, “Roses are Red and Violets are blue, if your Data isn’t protected then neither are you” or something like that.
• Tailwarden 2022 Recap: Our First Team Offsite: Energizing team bonding and professional growth in the vibrant city of Marrakech, Morocco: Our team offsite in the 'Red City' was a massive success.

And that’s all we have for January’s 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 up to date on our more frequent updates.

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