Introduction
Archer is a leader in enterprise risk and compliance management. With a highly distributed engineering organization and multiple global environments, Archer recognized a critical need to modernize and standardize its development practices to work toward engineering excellence.
Joshua Marble, Developer Experience Manager, and his team define engineering excellence by their team’s goals: breaking down silos, automating workflows, and empowering teams to build and ship with confidence, consistency, and speed.
To support this goal, Archer uses Cortex to centralize visibility and standardize service creation through catalogs and automated workflows that embed infrastructure, deployment, and operational best practices from the start. This ensures every new service is deployment-ready within hours, not months.
Ensuring readiness through standardized deployments
Before Cortex, deployment readiness was a challenge for Archer.
Teams often spent months building services with no clear path to production. There were no shared infrastructure patterns, templates, or deployment standards. According to Joshua: “We had projects that ran for 9-12 months, and no one even knew how or if they could be deployed.”
Each team handled setup on their own, manually provisioning resources and writing custom configurations. This led to inconsistent setups, missing operational requirements, and environments that were hard to support.
Without a standard process, developers had no clear definition of what “ready to deploy” meant. Leadership had limited visibility and often asked when services would deploy, with no consistent answer.
Cortex introduced a new standard: deployment readiness should not be a mystery metric.
Archer built a standardized Workflow combining scaffolding, infrastructure, deployment configuration, and cloud resources into a single process. Teams now go from concept to deployed service on a Kubernetes cluster in under 3 hours.
All new services follow a consistent, repeatable workflow that includes best practices and infrastructure requirements by default. Development and operations are now tightly integrated, eliminating friction and rework.
“Now, when someone runs a Cortex workflow, they finish with everything they need, ready to click and deploy. What used to take an engineer days to accomplish is now done in less than three hours.
It’s not only reducing time to deployment, but making the culture change that we deploy from day 1 and keep deploying while developing the service.” — Joshua Marble
Impact
Time saved per new service creation: ~24 hours
Total savings to date: $72,000 across 30+ workflow runs in just 3 months
Gave leadership confidence that new services could be deployed within hours instead of months.
Centralized visibility with the Cortex Catalog
As Archer’s service landscape grew, so did the challenge of finding accurate, up-to-date information about those services. Teams lacked a central source of truth, making it difficult to locate ownership, documentation, dashboards, and operational data.
Basic questions like “Who owns this service?” or “Where’s the monitoring dashboard?” often required digging through Slack threads or relying on tribal knowledge.
With Cortex, Archer introduced a single, searchable Catalog that brings together essential service metadata in one place. Support and operations teams now use it daily to access documentation, dashboards, and ownership details without having to ask around.
“Some of the biggest fans of the Catalog are non-engineering teams. It’s the one place they can go to find answers.” — Joshua Marble
Advice on making an IDP successful
Joshua advises teams implementing IDPs to stay open to value beyond their original goals. Archer started with a focus on workflows but later found unexpected impact in features like Scorecards and the catalog.
“Be open-minded. Some of Cortex’s most valuable features weren’t obvious to us at first. Once we embraced the platform, it helped shape our entire approach to developer experience. My favorite part is being able to bring all of our data into one place.... you can log in and see a lot of contextual information that you would have had to otherwise go click around searching for.” — Joshua Marble
He also points out that changing habits is key. Developers often rely on familiar, well-established tools they’re already comfortable with. Getting teams to start with Cortex took effort, but it led to better visibility, less manual work, and a more consistent experience.
“Once you commit to a better system and get teams using it early, you see how much confusion and manual effort it eliminates.” — Joshua Marble
Shipping with confidence, every time
Cortex has helped Archer replace manual, inconsistent processes with fast, repeatable workflows that make every new service deployment-ready from day one. What once took months can now be done in hours.
As the team builds new workflows for serverless services and leverages scorecards to guide migrations and modernization efforts, Cortex continues to power Archer’s push for greater speed, quality, and consistency across engineering.
“Cortex shaped how we deliver software. It gave us a foundation to move faster and build the right way from day one.” — Joshua Marble, Manager of Developer Experience, Archer
