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Latest Articles
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Best Practice
Accolades
Cortex awarded 2023 Innovation Leader for Internal Developer Portals
We are proud to announce that Cortex has been recognized as the 2023 best practice leader for North American Internal Developer Portals by leading technology analyst firm Frost & Sullivan. This recognition is based on Cortex's strong performance across technology and commercial metrics, from platform innovation and integration breadth, to customer success and organizational growth.
By
Cortex
-
November 16, 2023
open source
Open Source Developer Portals
When engineering teams begin struggling to manage the complexities of their software ecosystem, ownership becomes an issue, and developers feel like they don't know what to focus on next... they may set their sights on an internal developer portal. And if the organization has the resources to tackle it—an open source offering may be an attractive option. In this blog we'll cover the origins of open source developer portals and catalogs, and how to decide what's right for you.
By
Cortex
-
November 13, 2023
Use Cases
Feature Highlight
Cortex Initiatives: When scorecards need a deadline
Internal developer portals (IDPs) help drive standards of software quality and maturity, but that doesn’t have to mean a multi-quarter project. Make incremental progress on short- or long-term goals with Cortex Initiatives for Scorecards.
By
Fernando Cremer
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November 9, 2023
Cortex
Development
What is an internal developer portal?
An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is a central hub for tracking, improving, and building high-quality software. From services and APIs to Kubernetes clusters and data pipelines—IDPs abstract away the complexities of ensuring software security, maturity, production readiness, and more—all using data from your existing tools.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
November 2, 2023
Best Practice
How do you measure software health?
Improving the health of your services, APIs, data pipelines, and other software leads to fewer outages and frees developer time for feature work. In the third installment of our Scorecards deep-dive, we're sharing how Cortex makes tracking your software health easy with Scorecards and Initiatives.
By
Jeff Schnitter
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November 1, 2023
SDLC
What is an Internal Developer Platform
The last 5 years of software innovation has brought an explosion of architectural complexity designed to help teams ship faster, and more securely. Platform engineering teams have emerged to abstract away complexity for developers to do their best work, with a new category of tooling designed to do just that. Internal Developer Platforms (and Portals) have lofty value propositions but are still mired in confusion around attributes, owners, and outcomes. In this blog, we seek to provide a little more clarity across all.
By
Cortex
-
November 1, 2023
Best Practice
How do you measure operational maturity?
An organization with high operational maturity can build reliable products and services faster. In continuation of our series on top software maturity scorecards, we're taking a closer look at how to measure and improve operational maturity using Cortex scorecards, initiatives, and out of the box integrations.
By
Jeff Schnitter
-
October 26, 2023
Best Practice
Security
How do you measure software security maturity?
Consistent security best practices in your SDLC can minimize the risk of an incident while ensuring you have a plan in place to respond in a rapid, and uniform way. In this follow-up from our last post on top software maturity scorecards, we're taking a closer look at Security Scorecards—what they are, how to build them, and how Cortex can help.
By
Jeff Schnitter
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October 19, 2023
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Best Practice
Top three scorecards every organization needs for operational efficiency
Scorecards allow you to communicate and make progress on what is important to your organization. Based on what I've seen in my career as a long-time Principal Software Engineer at Workday, and now as a Solutions Architect at Cortex, I've put together a list of the three highest-impact scorecards for increasing operational efficiency.
By
Jeff Schnitter
-
October 12, 2023
Best Practice
Internal Developer Platform vs Internal Developer Portal: Solving for a Central System of Record, and Action
Developer Portals and Platforms are gaining popularity amongst engineering leaders that want to reduce cognitive load for developers. But the lines between these categories are starting to blur, creating more confusion in engineering teams about where to start. Here's our take on how the two differ, which should come first, and why none of this will likely matter in another year...
By
Cortex
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October 5, 2023
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Use Cases
Blocking deployments with your IDP
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.
By
Cortex
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September 14, 2023
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Product Updates
Introducing Cortex Plugins and Customization
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.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
August 31, 2023
Best Practice
Establishing a Kubernetes cost management strategy
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.
By
Cortex
-
August 16, 2023
Use Cases
What's missing from your incident management workflow
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.
By
Cortex
-
August 8, 2023
Product Updates
Introducing the revamped Team Catalog
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.
By
Lauren Craigie
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August 3, 2023
Cloud Migration
Best Practice
Accelerating software and system migrations with Cortex
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.
By
Cortex
-
July 20, 2023
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Cortex
How to Measure and Improve Platform Maturity and Operational Readiness
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?
By
Cortex
-
July 14, 2023
Cortex
Product Updates
How Cortex accelerates the process of building your information architecture
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.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
July 6, 2023
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Development
A New Way to Think About Your IDP 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.
By
Alex Poe
-
June 29, 2023
Cortex
Starting with the Right Foundations - The Cortex Engineering Maturity Curve
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.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
June 23, 2023
Development
Engineering
Metrics for measuring developer productivity
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.
By
Cortex
-
June 15, 2023
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Development
Engineering
Building a developer homepage: a one-stop shop for developers
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.
By
Ishan Mundra
-
June 7, 2023
Cortex
Business
A new standard for Internal Developer Portals - Putting our new Series B financing to work
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.
By
Anish Dhar
-
May 31, 2023
SRE
Development
Developer productivity and how SREs can track it better
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.
By
Cortex
-
May 17, 2023
Development
Improving engineering velocity with internal developer portals
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.
By
Cortex
-
May 10, 2023
Development
Why Scorecards are critical to your developer portal
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.
By
Cortex
-
April 27, 2023
Security
SRE
It’s RSAC 2023—and it’s time to think about a shift left for security and SRE tools
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.
By
Cortex
-
April 20, 2023
Security
Different types of code security practices
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.
By
Cortex
-
April 13, 2023
Kubernetes
Why Cortex and Kubernetes belong together
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!
By
Cortex
-
April 6, 2023
Engineering
Measuring and promoting engineering productivity
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.
By
Cortex
-
March 30, 2023
SRE
Cortex
How Cortex can help SRE teams amplify their reach
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!
By
Cortex
-
March 16, 2023
Development
Best practices for DevOps teams
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.
By
Cortex
-
March 2, 2023
Development
Engineering
Testing
Developer environments done right
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.
By
Aditya Bansal
-
February 23, 2023
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Cortex
Product Updates
Introducing Actions
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.
By
Cortex
-
February 13, 2023
SRE
Development
SRE Dashboards
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.
By
Cortex
-
January 26, 2023
Development
Business
A guide to successfully onboarding a developer
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.
By
Cortex
-
January 12, 2023
Cortex
2022 at Cortex: A year in review from our CTO
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!
By
Ganesh Datta
-
January 5, 2023
Microservices
Development
Manage your APIs from your internal developer portal
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.
By
Cortex
-
December 15, 2022
Development
Microservices
Getting internal documentation right
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.
By
Cortex
-
December 13, 2022
Development
Microservices
Taking incident management to the next level with an internal developer portal
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.
By
Cortex
-
December 8, 2022
Development
Microservices
Best practices for on-call scheduling and management
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.
By
Cortex
-
December 6, 2022
Cloud Migration
Business
This year's major trends in cloud migration
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.
By
Cortex
-
November 17, 2022
Integration
Cortex
How integrating AWS into Cortex augments visibility into your infrastructure
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.
By
Cortex
-
November 15, 2022
Security
Microservices
Effective vulnerability management for your microservices
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.
By
Cortex
-
November 10, 2022
Business
Engineering
The underappreciated power of technical project managers
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.
By
Cortex
-
November 3, 2022
Kubernetes
Cortex
How Cortex can help you get the most out of Kubernetes
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.
By
Cortex
-
October 18, 2022
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Integration
Cortex
How Cortex can help you get the most out of Datadog
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.
By
Cortex
-
October 4, 2022
Cortex
Product Updates
SRE
Scorecards for Resources
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.
By
Cortex
-
September 27, 2022
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Microservices
Development
Consider these 9 microservices best practices to help you ditch your monolith
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.
By
Cortex
-
September 14, 2022
Development
Your guide to measuring and improving code quality
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.
By
Cortex
-
September 7, 2022
Microservices
Cortex
Using Team Hierarchies to promote accountability
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.
By
Cortex
-
August 24, 2022
Microservices
Development
Building a DORA metrics Scorecard
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.
By
Cortex
-
August 10, 2022
Cortex
Microservices
Product Updates
Introducing the Resource Catalog
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.
By
Cortex
-
July 27, 2022
SRE
Microservices
Making SRE metrics work for your team
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.
By
Cortex
-
July 20, 2022
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Cortex
Microservices
Structuring your templates with Cortex’s Scaffolder
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.
By
Cortex
-
July 13, 2022
Microservices
Business
It’s the end of Q2 — Do you know how your microservices are doing?
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.
By
Cortex
-
June 29, 2022
Microservices
Testing
Testing your microservices architecture with Shift Left
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.
By
Cortex
-
June 22, 2022
Microservices
“Keep calm and use the runbook” – Why runbooks are the key to handling any situation effectively
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.
By
Cortex
-
June 15, 2022
Engineering
Cloud Migration
The 6 Rs of cloud migration
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.
By
Cortex
-
June 8, 2022
Microservices
Testing
Deployment strategies for testing microservices
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.
By
Cortex
-
June 1, 2022
Microservices
Cloud Migration
Cloud migration strategies for microservices
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
By
Cortex
-
May 18, 2022
Engineering
Microservices
Microservices architecture and design patterns
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.
By
Cortex
-
May 4, 2022
Business
Cortex
The story behind our name
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.
By
Anish Dhar
-
April 27, 2022
Engineering
Microservices
Testing
How to test microservices
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.
By
Cortex
-
April 20, 2022
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Microservices
Engineering
Security
Securing your microservices architecture
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.
By
Cortex
-
April 6, 2022
Engineering
Kubernetes
Microservices
Kubernetes service discovery
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.
By
Cortex
-
March 23, 2022
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