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Measure and improve developer productivity

September 21, 2022

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.

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.

September 7, 2022

Microservices

Improve, enforce, and ensure microservice quality

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

August 31, 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.

August 24, 2022

Development

Business

Why developer experience matters and how you can improve it

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

August 17, 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.

August 10, 2022

Cortex

Development

What is a developer portal and why do you need one?

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

Cortex

Microservices

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.

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.

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.

SRE

Microservices

Building reliable services: A guide to setting SLOs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Engineering

Cortex

How we cut our Postgres RPS by 50%

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.

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

Microservices

Cortex

Business

How service ownership improves shipping velocity

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!

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.

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.

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.

Microservices

Engineering

Best practices for logging microservices

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.

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.

Java

Engineering

Microservices

Creating Java Spring Boot microservices

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

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.

Engineering

Java

Microservices

A guide to Java microservice frameworks

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.

Microservices

How to strategically approach documenting microservices

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

Microservices

Service discovery for microservices: components, patterns & more

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

SRE

Understanding Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

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.

February 23, 2022

Cookiecutter

Engineering

Cortex

How to write a Cookiecutter template

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.

February 16, 2022

Business

Engineering

Microservices pros and cons

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.

February 9, 2022

Business

Cortex

Building Cortex as a remote-first company

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.

February 2, 2022

Cookiecutter

An overview of Cookiecutter

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.

February 2, 2022

SRE

Understanding DORA metrics

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.

January 26, 2022

Business

SRE

5 ways to measure the quality of your engineering culture

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.

January 19, 2022

Engineering

Business

11 best developer productivity tools for 2022: A buyer’s guide

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.

January 12, 2022

Business

Microservices

End the year with a smart strategy for your services in 2022

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.

December 21, 2021

Engineering

Cortex

How we expect the unexpected in Kotlin

`IntegrationValue<T>` is a type that can return any value but encapsulates all possible errors from 3rd party integrations. It allows us to handle expected and unexpected exceptions and errors gracefully and surface clean error messages to our customers when we cannot retry or handle them.

December 15, 2021

Business

SRE

Cookiecutter

Evangelize the SRE mindset at your organization

How are problems handled in your engineering organization? Learn how to evangelize the SRE mindset and foster a culture of ownership and reliability with these 7 tips.

Cristina Buenahora

December 7, 2021

Engineering

Business

Cortex

How we built a robust demo environment for our sales team

With the help of the Service Locator pattern in our React app, we created a container specifically for our demo environment that can pre-load specific API calls, giving sales reps a deterministic, stable, and reliable demo environment.

December 1, 2021

Business

Cortex

Announcing Cortex’s $15 Million Series A

Today, Cortex is announcing a huge milestone - our Series A round. The $15 million in funding, co-led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital, will help drive our mission to transform how engineering teams build and deliver great software.

November 18, 2021

Cookiecutter

Engineering

Cortex

How to start a data science project using Cookiecutter

Learn how to create a data science project using the UK government's existing Cookiecutter template for kicking off new projects by following these simple steps.

November 10, 2021

Business

SRE

The hidden costs of outages and quick first steps to preventing them

We all know that downtime is a problem, but how do you make that tangible for leadership? Here’s some data that quantifies the cost of outages, and tips for getting started early on preventing this worst-case scenario.

November 3, 2021

Cookiecutter

Cortex

Engineering

How to spin up a Python + Django Microservice using Cookiecutter

Learn how to create a Python + Django microservice using an existing Cookiecutter template by following these simple steps.

October 27, 2021

Business

Cortex

Three steps to a culture of quality

When it comes to working with microservices vs. a monolith, there are some cultural changes that every engineering team should consider. These three tips will help you avoid tricky sources of inefficiency and build better services.

October 20, 2021

Cookiecutter

Cortex

Engineering

How to create a Spring Boot Microservice using Cookiecutter

Learn how to create a Spring Boot microservice using an existing Cookiecutter template by following these simple steps.

October 13, 2021

Business

Microservices

Why today’s engineering leaders are focusing on standardization—and how you can too

Standardization is becoming a hot topic. Here’s why it’s so important, and concrete advice for bringing consistent operational practices to your engineering team.

October 5, 2021

Cookiecutter

Cortex

Engineering

Standardizing project templates with Cookiecutter

Cookiecutter is a flexible templating engine that allows your team to easily create new services based off standard templates that ensure consistent structure and follow the team's defined best practices.

September 29, 2021

SRE

How SREs can drive team adoption of the 4 golden signals

As an SRE, you probably already realize that the four golden signals—latency, traffic, errors, and saturation—are key for monitoring your system. The hard part is making sure your team adopts these signals and uses them to drive actual progress and prioritization. Here’s some tips for putting these numbers into action.

September 15, 2021

Integration

SRE

Instant service information using Cortex & Slack

By using Cortex and Slack together, you’ll always be up to date with the latest org-wide initiatives, be able to get quick information about services within Cortex, and know who to reach out when Cortex doesn’t have what you’re looking for.

September 9, 2021

SRE

Business

How to build a modernization strategy

Modernizing your company's infrastructure is critical to delivering high quality and secure software at lower costs. But undertaking modernization projects can be incredibly daunting - here we layout tips and strategies you can use to approach modernization at your company.

August 25, 2021

Integration

SRE

Handling incidents with Pagerduty & Cortex

Integrating Pagerduty into Cortex can help your team enforce adoption of on-call best practices for each service and team as well as track dozens of key metrics like MTTR through Scorecards.

August 19, 2021

Business

SRE

Improve velocity and reliability through service standardization

Establishing consistency in the way microservices are built can save time, lead to higher quality architecture, and allow the focus to be on the needs of the customer.

Integration

SRE

Monitoring application stability in Cortex with Lightstep

Integrating Lightstep into Cortex can help teams import services easily, view Lightstep SLOs, and monitor application stability through Lightstep specific Scorecard rules.

Development

SRE

Making security a first-class concern for developers

Despite security often being an engineer's after-thought, it is increasingly critical to the success of software products. Developers need tools and incentives to write code with security in mind.

Integration

SRE

Development

Monitoring application stability in Cortex with Bugsnag

Integrating Bugsnag into Cortex can help users monitor application stability through the use of Scorecards.

Business

Development

The 6 keys to onboarding engineers in a remote-first world

Remote work is here to stay - here's 6 tips you can use to build a great onboarding process and make your engineering team more cohesive and productive as a result.

Integration

SRE

Development

Monitoring development maturity in Cortex with GitLab

Integrating GitLab into Cortex can help teams import services easily, view Git commits alongside other events in the service timeline, and monitor development maturity using Scorecards.

Business

SRE

The power of adopting an SRE mindset

With the growth of the SRE role, we're exploring a few key SRE principles that we believe apply strongly across functions and all engineering teams would benefit from adopting.

Integration

SRE

Development

Monitoring code quality & security in Cortex with SonarQube

Integrating SonarQube into Cortex can help users monitor code quality and security through the use of Scorecards.

Business

SRE

Prepare for overnight success — with the right load testing approach

We've all dreamed of going viral and seeing usage skyrocket overnight but how do we actually prepare for that moment?

Integration

SRE

Development

Monitoring service issues in Cortex with Sentry

Integrating Sentry into Cortex can help users view Sentry events alongside other service events and pinpoint service issues.

Microservice Catalog

SRE

How to drive ownership in microservices

Keeping track of service ownership across all microservices is extremely important but how should teams self-organize to achieve it and where's the best place to start?

SRE

Development

4 ways to improve your influence as an SRE

On paper, being an SRE may look nothing like being in sales. But in reality, there’s more overlap than you might think. Learn four ways you can improve your influence within the engineering team as a SRE!

Integration

SRE

Development

Easily map Snyk vulnerabilities to Cortex services

Cortex integrates with Snyk to help map vulnerabilities to services in the catalog and monitor vulnerabilities using Scorecards.

Microservice Catalog

Development

How to make the move to microservices—with no regrets

The move from a monolith to a microservices can be daunting. Here are five things to keep in mind that we’ve learned from helping teams navigate this transition.

SRE

Business

The top 3 mistakes companies make with SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs

We see teams fall into a few common traps with SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs. In this article, we’ll define these acronyms and show you how to avoid the mistakes other teams make.

SRE

Business

How to create a great production readiness checklist

What does your team’s production readiness practice look like for deploying a new service? In this article, we’ll share some helpful approaches for creating a great production readiness checklist.

February 23, 2021

SRE

Business

Best practices for your team's on-call rotations

Your on-call system is vital to business — you must be able to help customers fix issues as fast as possible. But getting the rotation right is vital to keeping your team happy and engaged.

February 13, 2021

Kubernetes

How to visualize your k8s services with ownership, on-call, SLO's, and more

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for managing containerized applications. Since 2014, K8s has revolutionized modern application building towards containers and microservices.

February 3, 2021

Business

Why you need a microservices catalog tool

Microservices offer increased flexibility and scalability but how do you keep track of all your microservices?

February 9, 2021

Business

SRE

A guide to the best SRE tools

There are a lot of SRE tools out there but which are the most important to consider? We’ve compiled this guide to highlight the key categories of SRE tools and help you find the right tools for your team.

February 3, 2021

Engineering

Kubernetes

Beginner's guide to Kubernetes

An introduction to Kubernetes: We'll explore architectural concepts, advantages of using Kubernetes, how to set up Kubernetes, and how to run commands on a local machine using Minikube.

Arun Mathew Kurian

September 23, 2020

Kubernetes

Engineering

Understanding Kubernetes services & ingress networking

This article looks at the concepts of Kubernetes Services and Kubernetes Ingress.

Arun Mathew Kurian

September 23, 2020

Engineering

More sophisticated schemas with advanced GraphQL features

January 28, 2021

Microservices

Business

Monoliths vs. Microservices: Differences, Pros & Cons, and Choosing the Right Architecture

Learn the differences between monolithic and microservice architectures, their pros and cons, and the complexities of scaling each.

January 28, 2021

Business

Microservices

Engineering

Taming your microservices: The case for a modern catalog

Microservices and service-oriented architectures may be appealing alternatives to monoliths, but they come with their own challenges. Learn how you can tame your microservices with the right processes and tools.

SRE

What is SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)?

Historically, development teams and operations teams have been at odds.

January 28, 2021