TAP 1.6 – TAP GUI Supply Chain Plugin Updates

The Supply Chain Visibility plugin in Tanzu Developer Portal (TDP) which is formerly know as TAP GUI, is a key element of the TAP solution. This plugin enables the visibility of our workloads “path to production” as it traverses through the cartographer supply chain. In TAP 1.6, there are a few key enhancements that have been made, which enhance the usability, and overall UX of using this plugin. the main new features i want to call out in this post are: New Log Viewer Deliverable Status SBOM downloading In previous versions of TAP we had a very simple log viewer interface for the different steps within a supply chain that logs were relevant for, such as testing pipelines and image builds. While the previous log viewer worked it had some drawbacks that made it quite difficult to use in advanced scenarios. In TAP 1.5 for example, if you had a testing pipeline with multiple tasks, only the logs from the first task were shown. another issue was the build logs for the kpack image build were all streamed together from all containers in one view, which made understanding which step failed sometimes a difficult task. There were also no logs for the config writer step which was unfortunate. In TAP 1.6, the log viewer was completely revamped, and not only those issues above were solved, but we also got the ability to see the side by side view of a log from a task in tekton and the script content which is run by that tekton task, making debugging much easier and streamlined. As can be seen, the new log viewer is a huge improvement and it makes the overall UX much smoother than before!   The next major update for the plugin is actually in the overview page of the plugin. Previously, you could see the workload status and basic details as well as which clusters the deliverable was applied to in the overview table, but the deliverable status itself was not shown. Now in TAP 1.6, we hav a new field introduced to show us the deliverable status! While this may seem like a small feature, the ability to have a birds eye view of the overall status of my CI and CD status of all my workloads at one glance is awesome!   The final major feature i want to highlight for the supply chain plugin in TDP is a great new feature in the security realm. This new feature allows you to download the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) from the Supply Chain plugin directly. This allows you to easily with a single click, obtain the SBOM in SPDX or CycloneDX formats which are stored in the metadata store as a result from source code and image scanning steps in a supply chain! ​​​​​​​ This feature is great, and the ability to download in all of the major industry standard formats, allows for integrating easily with the wider security ecosystem, no matter which formats they work with. Summary As can be seen, this release of the plugin includes some great updates, with enhanced usability at the forefront! I’m truly excited to see where this plugin goes in the future, as the product keeps maturing and growing, and as backstage enables more and more opportunities and extension points for plugins like this!