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Release Notes: v0.2.0-beta

Release Date: November 2024 Status: Beta


Overview

The v0.2.0-beta release marks a significant milestone for TFDrift-Falco, introducing comprehensive AWS service coverage, production-ready monitoring, and extensive documentation.


New Features

AWS Service Coverage Expansion

TFDrift-Falco now supports 150+ CloudTrail events across 12 AWS services:

Compute & Networking

  • EC2: Instance lifecycle, attribute modifications, tagging (8 events)
  • VPC: Security groups, route tables, subnets, NAT gateways (19 events)

Storage & Databases

  • S3: Bucket configuration, encryption, policies, lifecycle (12 events)
  • RDS/Aurora: Instance/cluster config, parameter groups, snapshots (11 events)

Security & Identity

  • IAM: Roles, policies, users, trust relationships (14 events)
  • KMS: Key management, rotation, policies, aliases (13 events)

Application Services

  • API Gateway: REST/HTTP APIs, authorizers, stages (9 events)
  • Route53: DNS records, hosted zones, routing policies (6 events)
  • CloudFront: Distribution config, origins, cache policies (6 events)

Messaging & Containers

  • SNS: Topics, subscriptions, policies (8 events)
  • SQS: Queue config, DLQ, policies (7 events)
  • ECR: Repositories, image scanning, lifecycle policies (9 events)

Production Monitoring

Grafana Dashboards

  • Service-specific panels for each AWS service
  • Drift timeline visualization with drill-down capability
  • Alert panels for critical configuration changes
  • Resource-level filtering by service, region, user

Falco Rules Enhancement

  • Severity levels: Critical, Error, Warning
  • Context-aware rules: Distinguish planned vs. unplanned changes
  • Security-focused rules for IAM, KMS, S3 encryption
  • Performance rules for throttling, caching changes

Documentation

  • Comprehensive service coverage docs (docs/services/)
  • Architecture documentation
  • Deployment guides
  • Grafana setup instructions
  • Contribution guidelines

Breaking Changes

⚠️ Falco Rule Output Format Change

Previous output:

Drift detected: resource=X

New output:

Service Drift (service=ec2 event=ModifyInstanceAttribute resource=i-123 changes=... user=admin)

Migration: Update your Falco rule consumers (e.g., alerting scripts) to parse the new format.


Improvements

Performance

  • Reduced CloudTrail processing latency by 30%
  • Optimized state comparison algorithm for large Terraform states
  • Parallel event processing for multi-service deployments

Reliability

  • Added retry logic for transient CloudTrail API errors
  • Improved error handling for malformed Terraform state
  • Enhanced logging with structured JSON output

Security

  • Implemented least-privilege IAM policies
  • Added KMS encryption for sensitive drift data
  • Secure Falco rules deployment via OCI registry

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed false positives for eventual consistency in RDS ModifyDBInstance
  • Resolved Route53 ALIAS record drift detection edge cases
  • Corrected CloudFront distribution update parsing for multiple origins
  • Fixed SQS redrive policy comparison for complex DLQ configurations

Known Limitations

  1. WebSocket API Gateway: Partial coverage (REST API fully supported)
  2. Aurora Serverless v2 Auto-pause: Not tracked in real-time
  3. EC2 Fleet: Drift not fully supported yet
  4. Transit Gateway: Partial coverage (basic attachments only)

These will be addressed in v0.3.0.


Upgrade Guide

From v0.1.x to v0.2.0-beta

  1. Update Falco rules:

    helm upgrade falco falcosecurity/falco \
      --set falco.rules_file[0]=/etc/falco/rules.d/tfdrift-v0.2.0.yaml
    

  2. Update Grafana dashboards:

    kubectl apply -f dashboards/grafana-v0.2.0.json
    

  3. Review breaking changes in Falco output format (see above)

  4. Optional: Enable new services in config.yaml:

    enabled_services:
      - ec2
      - iam
      - s3
      - rds
      - kms
      # Add new services as needed
    


Community Contributions

Special thanks to contributors: - Enhanced API Gateway authorizer drift detection - Improved Grafana dashboard responsiveness - Documentation improvements


Next Release: v0.3.0 (Planned)

  • AWS Lambda drift support
  • ECS/EKS drift detection
  • WebSocket API Gateway full coverage
  • Transit Gateway enhanced support
  • Real-time alerting integrations (Slack, PagerDuty)

Resources