Whether it's ensuring a new service is fully equipped with security scanning, logging, and monitoring from the start, enforcing production readiness checks during deployment, or providing temporary credentials for a production database, Workflows directly support Engineering Excellence Initiatives around modernization and standardization.
Workflows was released last October and since then, our customers have:
Built over 1,000 workflows, rolling out 800 of these to their teams
Executed over 15,000 workflow runs
Scaffolded almost 5,000 new services
As part of our Summer Scoop Launch Party, we’re super excited to announce some of our recent Workflow releases:
The Blocks Library, accelerating workflow creation with plug-and-play common tasks
Async callbacks so complex workflows can pause while executing tasks on third-party services
JavaScript blocks, letting you build your own block by injecting custom code
At Cortex, our customers frequently pair Cortex Workflows with orchestration tools like Humanitec and Harness to seamlessly provision infrastructure while maintaining a human-in-the-loop interface. This integration means that, regardless of how advanced your orchestration system is today, Cortex Workflows are the essential UI layer that empowers developers and streamlines complex processes.
Why workflows
By automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, workflows allow teams to focus on innovation and critical decision-making rather than manual, error-prone processes.
Consistency and Standardization: By embedding best practices and organizational standards directly into workflows, teams can ensure that every process, from onboarding to code deployment, adheres to the same high-quality benchmarks.
Enhanced Efficiency: Automated processes reduce the time and effort needed to complete routine tasks. This not only speeds up deployments and incident management but also ensures that every step is executed consistently and accurately.
Improved Developer Experience: Integrating workflows into your developer portal creates a seamless, intuitive interface that brings everyday tasks into a single, accessible environment. This not only boosts productivity but also reduces friction in the development cycle.
Error Reduction: Automation minimizes human error, providing a reliable safety net across various operational tasks. Whether it's scaling infrastructure or managing security audits, workflows help prevent costly mistakes.
Scalability: As organizations grow, workflows provide a scalable solution that can adapt to increasing demands without a corresponding increase in manual overhead. This means you can quickly roll out new features and processes without reinventing the wheel every time.
In short, workflows transform how teams work by turning complex, multi-step processes into streamlined, automated experiences. They are a vital component for modern organizations seeking to boost velocity, maintain high standards, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
New: The Block Library
The Block Library in Cortex is designed to make building new workflows easier & faster. Here’s how:
Pre-Built Blocks: Instead of building every step from scratch, the Block Library provides a collection of pre-configured integration-aware blocks, from scaffolding new services to triggering incidents and updating infrastructure. This accelerates workflow creation by letting you simply plug-and-play common tasks.
Simplified Setup: With these ready-to-use blocks, engineers can bypass manual configuration typically required for repetitive tasks. The library standardizes blocks, ensuring consistency and reducing the potential for human error.
Extensibility and Flexibility: As a template of HTTP actions, the library can be easily extended or customized. If your team needs a unique action, you can propose new blocks, and they can be seamlessly integrated into the library, keeping your workflows agile and up-to-date.
Today the Blocks Library offers over 200 ready-to-use integration-aware components, and we add new ones every week. Each block encapsulates a common task, from scaffolding repositories and dispatching GitHub workflows to triggering incidents and updating downstream systems. Instead they plug a block into their flow, configure a few parameters, and immediately tap into pre-built logic that respects Cortex’s entity model and your team’s conventions.
Because every block is standardized, workflows remain consistent across projects and teams. When you need something custom, you can propose a new block and our library maintainers will vet and publish it, keeping your automation both powerful and compliant.
Overall, the Block Library not only boosts productivity by reducing the setup time for new workflows but also improves the developer experience by providing a clear, modular, and maintainable approach to automating complex processes.
New: Asynchronous callbacks
Some processes require external approvals or long-running checks. With asynchronous callbacks, workflows pause at a step and wait for something to happen, like provisioning a cloud resource or running the health check after a deployment, before continuing. This means you can orchestrate complex, multi-stage flows with external dependencies.
By incorporating asynchronous workflows, teams can better integrate human oversight and external triggers into automated processes. Asynchronous workflows keep your operations moving smoothly while ensuring every step is completed with the necessary checks and balances.
New: Build your own blocks using JavaScript
With the new JavaScript block, you can take full control of your Cortex Workflows by writing custom logic directly into your automation. It's the easiest way to extend what's possible.
Need to fetch data from an external API? Use the familiar fetch API to call out to internal tools, third-party services, or anywhere you need data to flow from. Want to manipulate that data before passing it along? Cortex gives you access to popular utility libraries like Lodash and Moment.js out of the box, so you can do everything from data transformation to time formatting with just a few lines of code.
Whether you're enriching payloads, enforcing custom rules, or building complex branching logic, the JavaScript block turns Workflows into a flexible, developer-friendly automation engine that fits the way your team works.
Real-life examples
Cortex Engineering loves drinking our own champagne
Cortex leverages workflows internally to streamline and automate nearly every facet of our development and operations process. For example, we use our production deploy workflow in Cortex for all releases. This automation standardizes deployments and notifies the relevant channels when complete, giving the whole team visibility into releases.
Our internal workflows extend beyond deployment. They’re integral to our incident management strategy, enabling us to quickly trigger rollbacks or scale infrastructure when needed. With workflows built directly into our IDP, we can enforce security standards and control permissions at a granular level, ensuring that only the right teams or individuals can execute critical actions. Additionally, onboarding new engineers is simplified: instead of juggling multiple manual tasks across different tools, new team members can request access through Cortex, which then automates the provisioning of GitHub accounts and other resources.
Cortex drinks our own champagne and our workflows are the backbone of our daily operations. This not only bolsters our internal efficiency and productivity but also serves as a living demonstration of how workflows can empower teams to focus on innovation rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
Xero’s domain and team management
Xero was an early adopter of our scaffolding capabilities and quickly transitioned to leveraging Cortex workflows to build all of their new services. By automating the creation and registration of new repositories, Xero enforces best practices from the start; they ensure everyone is starting off the same template, require a team to own the new service, and specify its product area. This approach has streamlined their development process, improved software health, and reduced the friction of moving away from a legacy internal portal.
A financial service’s git migration
A leading financial service is using Cortex workflows to automate a traditionally manual git migration. Their workflow takes repositories from one git instance and seamlessly transfers them to a new one, while automatically updating permissions, branch protection, and other important settings. This automation speeds up the migration process significantly and minimizes the risk of errors that come with manual interventions, ensuring that every repository is built the same way and ready to be used by engineering.
A major live ticketing platform’s new service orchestration
One of the leading live ticketing platforms leverages Cortex workflows as an orchestrator for launching new services. Their workflow integrates Cortex with their proprietary deployment tool and manages the entire service creation process, from automated tasks and external tool interactions to manual approval steps. This orchestration reduces manual errors, accelerates service deployment, and allows teams to focus more on innovation rather than on repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
Turning workflow innovation into business impact
Cortex workflows streamline complex, multi-step processes across your organization so you can focus on driving real business impact. With new features like the Blocks Library,Asynchronous callbacks, and JavaScript blocks, Workflows automate and simplify all kinds of historically manual processes for engineering teams.
We’ll be highlighting what’s new in workflows in the Summer Scoop Launch Party virtual event on May 29th, so sign-up if you’d like to see live demos alongside everything else new at Cortex.
If you’d like to learn more about Cortex Workflows, schedule a demo today and leave a comment with what process you’re thinking to accelerate so we can be ready with a demo instance tailored to your use case.
