Announcement

Steampipe made huge leaps forward in 2022!

Here's a month-by-month review of the highlights.

Steampipe Team
7 min. read - Dec 21, 2022

It's been a busy year. We launched Steampipe Cloud, pioneered "dashboards-as-code," enabled snapshots for both Steampipe Cloud and Steampipe CLI, and -- with the help of our community -- expanded our suites of plugins and mods. The year began with 50 plugins and 18 mods. We end the year with 90 plugins and 37 mods, many of which use dashboards -- also new this year -- to visualize benchmarks and queries.

Here are some of the highlights month-by-month.

January

In the first week of the new year we quietly launched the initial preview of cloud.steampipe.io. From a cold start with Steampipe CLI you can see your first batch of query results in a few minutes. Steampipe Cloud can get you there in seconds.

There's nothing to install, of course, but it's also easier to add plugins and set up connections. And once you've created a connection you can share it with team members in your organization.

February

Three new Terraform compliance mods -- for AWS, Azure, and GCP -- enable belt-and-suspenders security.

March

Steampipe dashboards arrive! We shipped an initial set of Insights mods with dozens of dashboards for AWS, Azure, and GCP. And we showed you how to use the dashboards-as-code system to visualize your own queries by writing HCL + SQL.

April

The entire suite of plugins is upgraded to version 3 of the plugin SDK which adds support for two new column types: inet and ltree.

May

Steampipe v14 arrives. Now Steampipe uses Postgres 14 and runs plugins natively on Mac M1.

Benchmarks can now run automatically as dashboards.

June

Steampipe v15 delivers progress bars for dashboards, Open Telemetry for better observability, and a bevy of quality-of-life improvements.

The pace of community activity increases, with notable contributions from François de Metz, harlequin, Jelmer Borst, Mark Heiges, Miles Smith, and srgg.

July

Gruntwork adopts Steampipe to deliver continuous compliance as a service to customers who deploy infrastructure using its IaC library.

Also, as in every month, a steady cadence of improvement. New plugins Crowdstrike, Trivy, and Vercel. A dozen new AWS tables. NIST 800-171 benchmark added to AWS Compliance. Google OAuth support for Steampipe Cloud. New GitHub tables thanks to japborst. net_http_request added to the Net plugin. AWS Perimeter debuts.

August

Steampipe v16 dramatically shrinks the memory footprint when running queries, benchmarks, and dashboards across hundreds of accounts.

The AWS Compliance mod gains five new benchmarks: GxP 21 CFR Part 11, GxP EU Annex 11, NIST 800-171 Revision 2, CISA Cyber Essentials, and Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC).

September

Benchmarks and dashboards can now run in Steampipe Cloud. The Center for Internet Security releases AWS CIS v1.5, we break down the most important questions to ask, and how to answer them using the new CIS v1.5 controls.

October

Hacktoberbest! Thanks again to GitHub users akumar-99, aminvielledebatAtBedrock, anushas-dev, AnykeyNL, asfaltboy, ashishsecdev, breck7, daeho-ro, digitalisx, fabpot, francois2metz, giant995, hannesfant, heav1811, hiepph, iamksgokul, jdenoy, kaggrwal, lakshyatyagi24, MichaelGraff, michizhou, mikoiv, Mr-Destructive, raksit31667, Santhusha-bit, SaumyaBhushan, sneakernuts, sriram-km, sudocurse, and tnorthcutt.

In Steampipe Cloud you can now take snapshots of benchmarks and dashboards, then view them, save them, and share them with your team.

November

The v17 release drops the other shoe. Now Steampipe CLI can take snapshots and push them up to Steampipe Cloud. To help you keep track of your cloud workspaces, you can now use workspace profiles.

We publish a case study on CMD Solutions' KPIs as code approach to continuous assurance .

December

This month we're heads down building some exciting new features that we're not quite ready to show. Thanks to all who used and supported Steampipe in 2022. Your engagement fuels our passion to keep innovating, and will continue to inspire us in the coming year.