Changelogs can feel like a never-ending chase, especially with a fast-shipping team. It almost becomes like a backlog of its own, we hear you!

To help you stay informed, we're launching Rely’s Update Roundup, a monthly series summarizing the latest changes between installments. These updates are a direct response to your invaluable feedback (thank you and keep it coming!).

This first February edition dives into 7 exciting releases! Buckle up and discover how these new updates can empower your development journey.

At the heart of your Rely platform is the Software Catalog. Its top priority is to have it as your single and central source of truth. So our efforts have been mostly invested in developing the plugins and APIs that populate it and keep it live. 

However, this resulted in a more backend-focused development where we started with “almost everything as text”. This meant that on the front end, the visual experience was still somewhat bland. This month we invested time to drastically improve the UI/UX and give your data the spotlight it deserves to make it even more legible for your users.

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Personalize the Catalog to reflect what matters to you and your team

We heard you: the catalog had the data you needed, but it was a “free for all” when it came time to find the one thing you cared about.

To help you organize your catalog, we have released this month the Property Tabs. They allow you to feature specific properties to make sure they get the attention they deserve. 

The tabs are created and saved for the entire organization, making sure everyone is redirected to the most important data in your catalog.

You can either dedicate a full tab to one key property (e.g. a ReadMe file, an API spec, etc.) or group selected properties.

When adding a group of properties, you can select if they should be shown or hidden by default and save the behavior for everyone, ensuring the same efficiency is accessible to all.

Property Tabs enable the creation of views specifically tailored to the jobs to be done by your users. For instance:

• A CI/CD tab under your Service to review the latest version deployment and its associated test results (in Snyk, SonarQube, etc.)

• An Observability focused tab under Running Services to quickly review all the key metrics of a newly released version before promoting it to a production environment or for first level investigations as part of the incident management process.

• A Configuration tab for SREs to review resource allocation in a few clicks

• Or any other customized experience you think of.

Navigate your Related Entities with great efficiency

Drilling down through the table of related entities could too easily turn into a tedious and time consuming process. This made investigations unnecessarily long, especially when you were pressed for time like during an incident.

This single and generic table has been broken down into dedicated tabs for each type of Related Entity, available under a new eponym section. This means looking up Related Entities is now standardized, regardless of the entity type. They are always just a scroll down.

While these tabs are created for you by default, you have full control over them. Edit, add, or delete them as you see fit and save the changes for everyone to enjoy. If you filter and save the tables, your filters will be saved as presets. Finally the up and down arrow icons showcase for you if these entities are either upstream or downstream.

Much like with Property Tabs, the Related Entity tabs allow you to create and save specific views for specific use cases. For instance:

• For a Service, show in a dedicated tab only the Running Services that contain the “prod” string in their name.
• For a Deployment, show all the Pull or Merge Requests it contains in one tab, and the Kubernetes clusters impacted by the deployment in another.
• Etc.

While tables are great at listing Related Entities, they do not easily give you a full picture of the context around a given entity. To make up for it, we also introduced the Related Entities graph view.

With it, you can identify at a glance your upstream and downstream dependencies and better understand the impact chain for any entity. This becomes especially handy for instance when assessing potential blast radiuses or SPOFs.

Support of new data types for your properties

First thing to acknowledge: not everything is a string. So in order to make distinctions between different data types visually evident, and to break the monotony of entity pages, we added support for the following data types:

URL

They now support on-click events, icons and titles distinct from the destination address.

Timeseries

Your Software Catalog now supports ingesting time series from your Observability tools (Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, etc.).  These properties are now updated live from your plugins and displayed in a graph view, an aggregated value or as an SLO target. 

These are time savers, especially when you are “browsing” around looking for fishy behavior during an incident. Instead of jumping around in your monitoring tools, start with a high level health assessment with performance metrics within the catalog. Found the weird looking metric? Now it’s time to jump into the specialized views of the right monitoring tool (using for instance a URL property?).

JSON, YAML & Markdown

Properties that describe objects (typically as JSON) or configurations (as YAML) used to be either heavily truncated or would take unreasonable amounts of screen space. This is now resolved with their newly released data types.

If you’re looking for the latest Kubernetes configuration, you should spend less time on finding it in the right tool (Lens, AWS Console, in a repo, etc.) than actually reading it. With these new properties, you can do it all in one click.

OpenAPI / Swagger

Your Services can now embed their API specifications and allow your users to review them directly from the catalog.

This will particularly be helpful when onboarding new members in your team. It also helps when different users need to understand how to interact with a Service they do not own or to check the latest version of a contract they depend on.

iFrame

On top of the URL property that redirects you to a page in a new tab, Rely now also supports rendering external pages or components directly within the catalog.

Those publically available dashboards or documentation pages you often visit have never been closer.

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We mentioned it earlier: your priority is to ensure that you establish and maintain a reliable Software Catalog.

Right after, comes ensuring its adoption within your organization. This requires a great user experience, both in terms of performance and visual appeal.

As a consequence of sending more data to your Software Catalog, your average number of Blueprints rapidly increased. Our initial menu experience did not scale well with this growth and led you to “searching for a needle in a haystack” before opening the right page in the catalog. 

To remedy this, we overhauled the app’s menus entirely. Beyond the visual improvements (it objectively looks better), the new menu emphasizes what matters most. Indeed, not all entities are created equal and you factually consult your Service pages much more often than your Domain’s.

You can now:

• Identify entities by their Blueprint’s icon and not just by their name
• Select which entities to show in the catalog by default and which ones can be hidden for now.
• Select which entities should be featured at the top of the catalog (pin / unpin actions) and freely order them so they are always one click away and at the same spot (just drag and drop them to change the order).

As a result, you no longer need to scroll at length to find what you need, and neither do your colleagues.

This month we also invested in improving the app’s general performance (reducing loading times by up to 300%) and improving contrasts across the board (we believe in being Dark Mode first even if it does come with its set of challenges).

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