Back Story

“There has got to be an easier way.” said Alexander for the umpteenth time. “Yea, they say if you are clicking in the UI, you are doing it wrong.” I replied. “We will stick it into an Ansible file later, but for now I am just going to turn on this SQS queue manually. Look how easy, click this little enable button on the SQS tab of the Lambda Detail, clear as day.” he retorted.

“The tech said yes, but the tools said no, no, no;”

“Let’s grab a beer. I have an idea” I said. This wasn’t the first time we had to do this. It seemed that every tool we enjoyed had it’s own set of nuances, whether it is that they only offer a cli, but no infrastructure as code modules, or the configuration was setup way deep inside the AWS Console, with no hope of remembering how you just did that, and wondering how the heck you will do that in your other 10 environments.

Awe, much better. Here’s to a good idea (and that beer is a-ok too)

As we drank down those beer(s), I started to say how there has to be a better way. There needs to be a tool that you can run all these amazing tools from within. You should be able to have all the api’s connected, and sharing data between them, deploying all this crazy “cloud” code and most importantly seeing your data, just easily viewing it. All these tools that are out there are great, the best, it’s why we use them, but there was not a cohesive spot to see them all. Every tool has a different website, different logins, different levels of quality. Most are good, some are ok, and a few are just downright painful to use, but the biggest issue is they are just so varied. You have to SSO into the one site, or use your email and password at another, or jump into incognito so you don’t have to logout of the other, but then you can’t use your LastPass because it doesn’t work in incognito, so you have to open the LastPass extension and copy paste the credentials. Or for data, you have to download Navicat or DataGrip for your database, and Postman for your api, Transmit for S3 and many more. These are great tools, I love to use them, but I don’t like the fact that I need to switch contexts constantly just to run a modern day “cloud” system. Then, you go to find a good Redis UI, and realize, there might not be one in the whole world, so you download some tool that someone open-sourced but hasn’t updated in two years, and you use that. Or you use some random MongoDB database UI and it crashes on you every time you copy paste, so you learn to do it through the menu. Best of breed products for building stuff, but the tools to manage them are just so cumbersome.

We left that bar and I drew this.

Commandeer Dashboard — (Unreleased next version — possibly 1.0)

Or more correctly, we started building what we dreamt up that night, which has culminated in the above dashboard. If you ever stumbled upon LocalStack, and thought the world has just gotten so much better, because you can run your AWS Cloud on your local computer, we think you are going to feel the same about this tool.

We have been building this app in our spare time, and have offered it free while in beta mode so that we could learn more about how people were using modern day cloud systems. There are currently 22 services available. They aren’t an attempt to replicate what every one of the sites that host the service does, or the cli’s to run commands does. They are a way to more easily view your system holistically, and cohesively. We aim to offer about 90% of functionality that you really need, and if you need to tweak something in the main system, that is how you should do it, but we know that as you use this more and more you will start to be like us, and realizing it is replacing a lot of needs of going back to playing browser wars with the cloud.

Current Available Service List

We have a large backlog of items that we are working through for the above items and also have about 10 more services that we are planning on integrating in as well.