The CEO Pocket Guide to Internal Developer Portals

Many CEOs are asking for new ways to measure engineering productivity. Learn about three metrics that CEOs now want to see, and how they help with decision-making at the highest level.

Scorecards help you define standards for production readiness, but did you know you can also prevent services and resources from being deployed if they don’t match standards for security, reliability, testing, etc?. You just need an IDP like Cortex, and a connection to your favorite CI/CD provider.

Whether and how to measure software developer productivity is a frequent point of contention in the tech community. In this article, we discuss the latest thinking, so you can decide for yourself.

Future-proof your IDP with Cortex’s new plugin framework and UI customization. Bring data from anywhere, and extend the Cortex UI with embeddable JavaScript apps and widgets. Provide users with more context on services, resources, teams, and domains right where they need it most, without requiring them to switch between multiple applications.

Many organizations are making the switch to Kubernetes for the promise of greater speed, and reduced costs. But controlling spend requires close attention to what's happening in your services and resources. Cortex helps organizations keep costs in check with Catalogs, Scorecards, and Initiatives.

Incident management is hard enough without spending 30 minutes looking for the owner of a given service or resource. But it hasn't always been easy to surface this information. Internal Developer portals are helping companies slash MTTR with better communication paths and fully integrated experiences for devs and support teams.

We've upgraded the Team catalog experience to add the same level of dimensionality as the Services, Resources, and Domains Catalogs. Now users can add more information about teams like relevant custom data, links, and integrations, and drill down into aggregate team activities and performance.

Updating a software version, moving to Kubernetes, onboarding a new CI/CD tool... some of these decisions could have enormous productivity upside for your team, while others carry significant risk if not executed by a certain deadline. In either event, getting everyone aligned with what to do, when—is never an easy task. Learn what to avoid for speedy migrations, and how Cortex helps.

Working on software infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is rarely a good use of time. That probably sounds obvious, but perhaps the next question is less straightforward: what should engineering platform teams do instead?

This is the second of a two-part blog on things to consider when mapping your information architecture. In the first, we shared some tips on how to approach this process based on best practices from the Cortex Customer Engineering team. In this blog, we’ll share how new and existing features in Cortex accelerate creation of a more resilient information architecture.

The phrase "information architecture" is often used in website design when strategizing how to share the most relevant information, quickly. But that's not the only application. Learn how the Cortex Customer Engineering team uses UX design principles to help customers design their data model ecosystem.

The path to engineering excellence has no shortage of tooling for improving developer experience. But what has been missing is an understanding of where to begin. Developed from hundreds of engineering team conversations, the Cortex Engineering Maturity Curve has become a trusted guide for IDP evaluation and onboarding—meeting customers where they’re at for faster time to value.

In modern software engineering, traditional metrics to measure developer productivity cannot accurately measure the quality or efficiency of the development team. So here is an article about the most effective metrics to measure and improve developer productivity.

In this comprehensive guide, a Cortex engineer shares the essential steps in building and implementing a developer homepage. Learn how this feature can streamline the developer’s workflow, funneling important and actionable information to your team members.

Cortex has raised $35m in Series B financing. New investor IVP led the round alongside Craft Ventures, with participation from existing investors Sequoia, Tiger Global, and YCombinator. Cack Wilhelm of IVP joined our board.

In this article, we explore the features and capabilities of the top five vulnerability scanning tools so that you can consider all the key factors before selecting one.

We’ve put together this guide to help SREs boost developer productivity by enhancing collaboration, strengthening infrastructure, and streamlining processes. Read on to discover the importance of strong developer productivity in SRE and insights into achieving a more effective software development life cycle in your organization.

Internal developer portals can improve your engineering velocity and provide valuable insights into your team’s performance. Learn how developer portals can enhance collaboration, streamline processes and optimize workflows, ultimately resulting in better software development and faster delivery times.

Golang microservices add efficiency, agility, modularity, and scalability to microservices, increasing performance and improving the user experience. Read on to learn more.

Resource Scorecards help to drive the adoption of the best coding standards, improve code quality, and foster innovation. You can enhance visibility, compliance, and decision-making across your company by using Cortex’s Scorecards.

The annual RSA conference is here, providing a great opportunity to evaluate the latest trends in security and reliability. One area to explore? Developer tools, which promote best practices and compliance early on in the software development lifecycle.

Developers can protect software applications from unauthorized access, modification, and exploitation by implementing different types of code security practices, such as white-box and black-box testing, static and dynamic application security testing, and software composition analysis. Read on to learn more.

Kubernetes gives developers autonomy and allows them to work faster, and as a result, standardization can fall by the wayside. Learn how Cortex can help you introduce consistency into your k8s practice, and make sure to visit us at KubeCon this month!

Measuring engineering productivity can be a great way to understand where teams could benefit most from support. Use holistic metrics to measure productivity across your team, and leverage workflow tools to empower teams to be more productive.

Static analysis tools examine software’s source code without running the program. Learn how to use these tools to measure code quality during the early stages of development.

Site reliability engineers can amplify their reach and influence across teams with Cortex in their toolbox. With the ability to define clear standards and drive progress, Cortex enables everyone at an organization to adopt an SRE mindset. Make sure to visit us at SREcon to learn more about how Cortex can serve as a single source of truth for your SRE team!

Code coverage measures the extent to which a software’s source code has been tested and validated. Learn how these tools can help you cover all the codebases.

DevOps teams improve efficiency and reliability in development workflows, helping engineers spend less time building processes from scratch and more time programming. These best practices will set your DevOps team in the right direction.

Developer environments can streamline testing, and can encourage experimentation and creativity from engineers and non-engineers alike. In this article, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of developer environments, and dive into best practices for those who adopt them.

Tech-based businesses benefit from well-executed platform migrations. Learn how to run a successful migration and ensure operational efficiency.

With the introduction of Actions, the self-serve Cortex internal developer portal has become even more powerful. Now, Cortex users can deploy services, provision resources, and get temporary access keys — among other things — all in one place.

Among many other responsibilities, software development teams must reduce development and testing time while maintaining code quality. Read this article to learn how you can achieve that.

SRE dashboards provide a high-level overview of applications, deployments, or code tiers within selected environments. Read on to learn the different types of SRE dashboards, why they're important, and how to integrate this vital tool into your SRE system.

An internal developer portal is a single pane of glass that shows specifications, key parameters, and technical information about software development. Read on to learn how to set one up.

A good onboarding process should give a new developer the tools they need for success and autonomy. In this guide, we’ll take a look at a few key parts of welcoming new team members into your organization.

As we kick off 2023, we're reflecting on all of the incredible opportunities last year brought us. From the advancement of internal developer portals to the expansion of our platform, 2022 was a year of growth. We can’t wait to see what this year brings!

We’re rounding out the year with a look back on community trends and new Cortex features—then taking a peek at our plans for 2023.

The internal developer portal links various parts of your architecture, including microservices, dependencies, and resources. In this article, we'll cover how you can manage your APIs from a dev portal, too.

With internal documentation, developers can keep track of various processes, making it easier to share knowledge and get new team members up to speed. Learn more about how to get this necessary practice right with your organization.

A developer portal provides easy access to information about microservices and resources, enabling your teams to respond quickly to unexpected issues. Read on to learn why internal developer portals are an essential part of every incident management strategy.

Properly setting up on-call scheduling systems creates arrangements that ensure developers are available to maintain and improve the microservices infrastructure. In this article, we'll discuss some best practices for scheduling and managing employee on-call systems.

With the introduction of CQL reports, Cortex users can now generate reports based on queries, gaining more visibility into services and resources than ever before.

The Cortex Query Builder helps you run custom queries to filter data on your service catalog. Learn more about it here.

Recent years have seen a large number of companies pouring an extraordinary amount of resources into moving their applications to the cloud. Read this piece to learn about cloud migration trends in 2022.

With the Resource Catalog, Cortex can augment all the vital data you have in AWS, while providing even greater visibility into your infrastructure. Learn more about how to get the most out of AWS by integrating with Cortex, and make sure to stop by our kiosk at re:Invent.

Security vulnerabilities expose software to malicious attacks that compromise data or damage the system, making vulnerability management a crucial part of working with microservices. Read on to learn effective strategies for managing vulnerabilities.

Integrating Mend into Cortex not only provides insight into service and resource vulnerabilities, but also gives teams the ability to monitor issues and set quality standards with scorecards.

We’re excited to announce the release of our Jira integration for Initiatives! Users can now automatically create JIRA issues for Initiatives, letting you stay close to where teams already work.

Technical project managers play a vital role in engineering organizations, but the manual work of tracking progress can get in the way of their impact. Cortex helps TPMs focus on what really matters.

Reporting helps teams make efficient decisions by increasing visibility and providing them with the information required to reduce risks. Read on to know more.

Using the right developer tools that integrate with your team’s workflow reduces time and effort and improves the software quality. Read more about the best tools here.

You can document your software API in a centralized virtual hub called a developer API portal. Read on to find out more about developer API portals and learn how to build them.

A successful cloud migration requires making critical decisions based on company needs, existing infrastructure, and the kind of migration. Read on for more.

By providing you with unparalleled visibility into your services and infrastructure components, Cortex can help you get the most out of Kubernetes. The service and resource catalogs backed by the power of scorecarding not only provide deep insights, but allow you to establish and enforce best Kubernetes practices.

Read on to learn more about SRE fundamentals that describe the principles and practices used by software developers to build reliable and scalable applications.

Cortex’s Discovery Audit feature keeps you informed about your services’ status by working on a schedule to find data across all integrations. Read on to learn how you can use it.

A code review is a systematic process of evaluating written code to improve its quality by discovering and correcting bugs. Learn more about coding review best practices here.

Cortex is uniquely equipped to augment Datadog’s observability tools, providing deeper insights and greater visibility into your services. Learn more about how Cortex can help you maximize your APM tools, and make sure to stop by our booth at Datadog’s Dash conference.

DevOps and SRE roles have some overlap, but they support very distinct parts of the development cycle. We break down their different responsibilities and day-to-day work in this article.

With the introduction of the Resource Catalog, Cortex revolutionized the way developers work with their microservice architecture. Now, with Scorecards for resources, you can gain even more insight into your resources and treat them like any other production-grade asset.

To ensure that the developer team builds quality software fast and efficiently, you need to measure and improve developer productivity. Read on find out how.

We’ve broken down the best strategies to apply before, during, and after microservice migration so that you can sail through the most common operational and engineering challenges.

Continuous improvement of code quality through analysis, reviews, and tests is crucial in determining the final quality of the software. Read on to understand how you can measure and improve the quality of your code.

Learn how to build a lasting foundation of reliability in less time, no matter what stage your services are at today.

With Cortex’s Team Hierarchies, leaders can gain powerful insight into how teams are operating. Hierarchies empower leaders to take a people-first approach to service maturity and drive accountability across their organization.

A good developer experience improves morale, productivity, and retention. Learn about understanding developer needs and improving the developer experience.

DORA metrics offer invaluable insight into how your DevOps teams are performing. With the power of Scorecards, you can transform these analytics into action, and set meaningful goals for improving your processes.

An internal developer portal is a central information hub about API products, documentation, and microservices. Read to know how your developer team can use it.

The Resource Catalog offers unparalleled visibility into your infrastructure, unlocking the ability for developers to manage and track these assets just like services. By promoting ownership and accountability, the Resource Catalog revolutionizes the way we see service architecture.

SRE metrics are standards that help you track important workflows and measure your organization’s performance, efficiency, and reliability. Keeping microservices architecture up and running requires constantly measuring its health using SRE metrics. To learn more about using SRE metrics, read on.

Cortex’s Scaffolder tool helps you build and modify services using a consistent template. This can remove redundancies and keep different types of code standardized based on that template. Learn more about structuring your templates with Cortex’s Scaffolder here.

Setting relevant SLOs is the key to improving service reliability for your users. Read this guide to understand what service level objectives are and how you can set effective ones with your team.

With a new quarter coming up, this is the perfect time to look back at how your microservices have performed and plan improvements. Here are some ways to improve your planning process for Q3 and beyond.

Since your team is often making changes to software, it is inefficient to test your software only before production. Microservices architecture should integrate shift left testing from the beginning of the development cycle to detect software bugs early on and proactively plan tangible processes to resolve issues. Read on to learn more.

The key to building reliable services is proper preparation. See here how runbooks can help you do just that, by ensuring the right knowledge is readily available when you need it most.

Depending on your business’s scale, your application’s use cases, and available resources, you can choose from the 6 Rs of cloud migration. This article provides information regarding the suitability and benefits of these migration strategies helping you decide which cloud migration approach best fits your needs.

Microservices need to be continuously tested against end-users to adapt the application to changing preferences and requests. Read on to learn about how development teams need to plan robust deployment strategies before testing microservices.

Over the last year, we’ve been focusing on scaling our infrastructure to handle our growing number of customers and introducing key process changes to help manage complexity.

With a significant number of companies moving their digital infrastructure to the cloud, a good cloud migration strategy could be the difference between functional applications and disrupted workflow. Read on to learn how to choose the best strategy specific to your company’s cloud migration needs

At DockerCon 2022, we had a conversation with engineering leads from two successful platforms about how they manage microservices, reliability, and more. Check out the highlights here!

When building a microservices application, you have many options for how you approach inter-service communication, data management, and more. Here are some common design patterns for microservices architectures.

We’ve always been committed to giving engineering teams a central way to organize and understand their architecture, but did you know we weren’t initially called Cortex? Here’s how we found our name & why it’s the perfect fit for us.

Continuously testing microservices at different stages of production and development helps you see how each microservice works individually and how it integrates with other services in the network. Learn more about how you can use different strategies to test microservices architecture.

Logging is an essential debugging and analytics tool for any software system. Here’s how to approach logging for microservices, which come with unique challenges given their distributed nature.

Implementing effective security protocols as an ongoing process in the software lifecycle is critical to protect against attacks. Here are some of the best practices to implement a comprehensive security strategy for microservices.

Learn about creating Spring Boot microservices using Spring Initializr, JHipster, or through custom templating.

Kubernetes is a pioneering open-source system that automates the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. In this post, we'll go over a few fundamentals of containerized applications and how service discovery works in Kubernetes.

With so many Java frameworks out there, how do you know which one is the best fit for your microservice architecture? Learn about a few key frameworks and primary considerations before you adopt one.

Documenting microservices helps to increase developer productivity and resolve issues faster. Here’s how to approach this key part of microservices architecture software development.

Learn how to automatically locate available instances within a microservice architecture with Cortex's guide to service discovery for microservices.

MTTR can provide insight into how effectively your team responds to incidents and how reliable your software is. Learn more about this valuable metric, how to interpret it, and how to leverage this information to minimize downtime.

Cookiecutter has thousands of ready-made templates, but it’s also easy to write your own! In this article, you’ll learn how to create a custom template to standardize just about any part of your development workflow.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of microservices vs. a monolithic architecture? Here are some things to keep in mind if you’re starting to investigate a microservices migration in 2022.

Cookiecutter is a templating library for creating boilerplate for projects in any programming language. In this article, we dig deeper into Cookiecutter’s capabilities, use cases, and tradeoffs.

Remote work presents unique challenges for innovation, execution and iteration – all of which are key to building a product that people love. These challenges are even more pronounced when building a company from scratch! Here’s how we navigated building a remote-first company at Cortex.

How does your DevOps team stack up against competitors? Learn about DORA metrics, what they can reveal about your team’s performance, and how they can help you make informed business decisions.

We’ve looked at five pillars of high-performing engineering organizations to show you how to standardize, quantify, and track your way to a better culture.

From project management tools to searchable repository apps to integrated database management systems, here are the best productivity tools for developer teams in the coming year, from the experts at Cortex.

No matter where you are on the road to microservice architecture, here’s a plan to make next year one of continual improvement at your organization.

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