2022 was a big year for Hava, several key appointments saw the team almost double in size. We have spent a lot of time thinking about how people use Hava and how Hava can help make cloud practitioner's day to day work lives easier. We use Hava internally ourselves to document and monitor Hava so we understand how it makes our lives easier too!
New features
It's been a busy year for us, and we've released a lot of new features for our clients that have pushed us forward and enriched the capabilities and maturity of the application. We have added support for many new cloud services across all the providers we support. We won't list them all here TLDR; , as we would be here until next year, but here are some of the favourite features we are especially proud of:
Light embedded viewer
We created a lighter embedded diagram that can be published externally without you having to be concerned about any secure metadata being shared. This is also a self updating endpoint which allows you to embed once and the diagram stays up to date. See more here
Embedded PNGs
Our interactive embedded viewer relies on JavaScript and Iframes to display the requested resources, this doesn't work so well when you're working with markdown files or other more developer focused tools. So we've created the embedded PNG, which gives you the power of an auto-updating diagram directly inside your developer documentation. e.g. next to your IaC in GitHub.
Confluence Plugin
We are strong believers of placing architecture diagrams where the documentation lives, but up until now it has been hard to have automatically updating diagrams. Atlassian is one of the biggest document and project management platforms on the planet, and with this new plugin you can now integrate the power of automatically updating and interactive diagrams directly in Confluence. Making sure all stakeholders have access to the latest information without having to step out of the tools they use. Read more about the confluence plugin here.
Terraform Provider
We use Terraform internally to manage our infrastructure, and like many others we have account setup scripts that run across all our accounts. We wanted all our accounts set up with Hava so we have a full view of everything deployed, so in the spirit of drinking our own kool-aid, why not create a way for us to integrate Hava with our cloud account setup scripts. The result was we created a Terraform provider and made it public, so that everyone can use it to manage their sources in Hava as they are deployed. Read more about the Hava Terraform Provider here.
GitHub Action
Following the theme of making Hava easier to use and more tightly integrated with the every day workflow of technical teams, we wanted to provide a way for platform and DevOps engineers to make Hava a part of the deployment pipelines for their workloads. This GitHub action is the first foray into this, where a sync and an export of an environment can be triggered post deployment so you can automatically update your documentation. Read more about the Hava GitHub integration here
Self-Hosted went GA
2022 was infamous for security incidents, some big brands like, Slack, CircleCI, and Lastpass, got a lot of press coverage for their incidents. It's understandable why Security has been a big focus for the year, and we released a Self-Hosted version of Hava that can run inside your own environment. This means you have control over your data and Hava runs entirely within your security scope. This has been especially created to help our users comply with governance and compliance requirements.
SSO for Teams went GA
Single Sign-On is another security feature that helps reduce the attack surface of an organization, and of course we wanted to make sure that we followed best practices around this. We added support for both SAML and OIDC based SSO for our multi-user accounts
New Billing
We took a big chance this year by introducing a free tier, and changing our approach to billing. In the past we've charged per user, but we found that to be unfair, as some users were using a lot more compute resources than others. With the goal of making it more fair for everyone, we have changed to a model where you only pay for what you use. In our case, per Source you pull data from.
Performance Improvements
With us providing you new features and support for new cloud services to Hava, coupled with an influx of new users our servers were in danger of getting strained. We've spent a lot of effort scaling and making some of our features, like search, a lot more performant. This has made creating new environments much more interactive and snappy, creating a much better user experience for everyone.
New partners
Just as we have had a lot of new features and improvements with the product over the last year, we have also started working with a new partner to help drive adoption across the industry. If you are an MSP or professional services organisation with a large client base that would benefit from the clarity Hava brings to the table, we are alway open to partnership conversations.
Accubits
We are excited to have partnered up with Accubits, a premier technology solutions provider. Together, working to help companies improve their cloud infrastructure, increase efficiency and cut costs. Both companies are excited about this collaboration and its positive impact on the industry.
What's on for 2023?
We are very excited for 2023 and have some big plans. We want to make Hava into a tool that helps everyone keep track of what is happening in their cloud environments.
Without giving too much away, expect to see more views, more detailed information about your environments, and integrations in the future!
