Every engineering leader knows the stress of an upcoming seasonal spike. Whether it’s tax season, open enrollment, or Black Friday, there’s always that moment where someone says, “Are we actually ready?”
It’s usually followed by a scramble: auditing services, chasing down owners, updating spreadsheets, running perf tests, checking alerting thresholds, verifying infra configs—much of it manual, fragmented, and slightly different every time. It’s exhausting. And it’s risky.
It’s also one of the most common reasons teams adopt Cortex.
Why seasonal readiness makes a natural starting point
When we talk to new customers, we often ask, “What’s the trigger that made you start evaluating production readiness tooling?” More often than not, it’s a seasonal milestone. Not an outage. Not a reorg. A calendar event.
Seasonal moments expose your readiness weaknesses—at a large scale.
You need alignment across dozens or hundreds of services
The pressure is high, and the margin for error is low
You’re juggling infra changes, staffing shifts, and release plans all at once
And if something goes wrong, it’s not just an internal postmortem—it’s business impact
So it makes sense that this is where many teams get serious about production readiness as a practice, not a manual checklist.
In fact, as highlighted in the 2024 State of Software Production Readiness report, nearly half of engineering leaders said seasonal surges were the moment they realized their existing readiness process wouldn’t scale. It’s a forcing function—and a valuable one.
These aren’t just busy periods—they’re business-critical events with real financial consequences.
And for engineering teams, they force a different level of scrutiny:
Are the right alerts in place?
Are escalation paths current?
Are services still aligned with infra and security best practices?
Do owners know what they’re responsible for?
For many organizations, answering these questions means pulling up outdated spreadsheets, chasing down owners, and holding cross-functional meetings just to figure out what’s broken. That’s time your team doesn’t have when peak traffic is on the way.
A tale of two Cortex customers
We’ve seen this play out at scale.
One of our customers, a large consumer platform with millions of users, was preparing for their most critical traffic week of the year—Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Historically, they handled readiness through a mix of tribal knowledge, spreadsheets, and one-off Slack threads. They hired more TPMs to manage the process. It worked—until it didn’t.
They adopted Cortex to codify readiness criteria across all teams—monitoring coverage, incident response plans, alerting configs, owner assignment, infra best practices—and track compliance automatically. Instead of a manual audit, they had real-time visibility. Instead of hiring more TPMs to chase teams down, they had a clear list of actions for every service.
Another Cortex customer, a major U.S. financial services company serving millions of customers annually faced exactly this challenge in the lead-up to their busiest season.
They needed to prepare hundreds of services for a predictable traffic surge, but found themselves blocked by three major issues:
Information silos: Engineers spent significant time searching across Confluence, Jira, Slack, and other tools just to find the state of each service.
Inconsistent readiness: There was no unified definition of what “production ready” meant, and teams weren’t uniformly following best practices.
Manual coordination: Seasonal readiness required standing up war rooms, running internal audits, and holding multiple org-wide meetings just to surface the most urgent gaps.
Since implementing Cortex, this organization has shifted to a model where readiness standards are codified across all services. They use dashboards to track which services meet their seasonal requirements, where the gaps are, and who’s responsible for resolving them.
Now, instead of time-consuming audits and repeated status meetings, teams get a clear view of where they stand—and what needs to happen to get ready.
They told us:
“Most of our vendor relationships are cordial at best and antagonistic at worst, but what we have with Cortex is a true partnership.”
From Seasonal to Continuous
The problem with traditional, manual seasonal readiness is that it’s reactive. You prep for a known date. You build a checklist. You tick the boxes. And then, in many organizations, you forget about it until the next cycle.
But software doesn’t sit still. Dependencies change. Ownership shifts. Teams refactor or deprecate services. Standards evolve.
With an IDP like Cortex, not only is seasonal readiness clear and straightforward, “continuous readiness” is enabled. The concept is simple: readiness shouldn’t be something you achieve once—it should be something you maintain, like observability, security, or CI/CD hygiene.
We would never say, ‘this service passed its security scan last year, so we don’t need to check it again.’ Why treat readiness any differently?
Continuous readiness is about codifying the standards that matter, integrating them into the developer workflow, and making them visible and actionable—at all times, not just when you're about to ship a major release or prepare for a surge in traffic.
What This Means for You as an Engineering Leader
If you’re leading a team responsible for platform, reliability, or delivery at scale, seasonal readiness is probably a pain you’ve already felt. But it can also be a useful wedge to create long-term cultural and operational improvements.
When you adopt Cortex for seasonal readiness, you’re not just solving a one-time problem. You’re introducing structure, visibility, and accountability to the way your organization prepares software for production.
And once you’ve done that, the path to continuous readiness—where every service stays compliant, every team knows what’s expected, and production is no longer a source of stress—becomes a natural evolution.
What It Looks Like in Practice
When organizations adopt Cortex for seasonal readiness, they get:
A shared definition of “ready” across engineering, platform, and SRE teams
Automated enforcement of standards for monitoring, alerting, ownership, dependencies, and more
Live dashboards and metrics that show who’s ready—and who isn’t
Fewer meetings and faster coordination, especially in high-stakes periods
It starts with a single milestone. But over time, these practices become foundational to how teams operate—and how engineering leaders drive quality and reliability at scale.
Final Thought
Readiness doesn’t need to be a scramble. You can systematize it. You can automate it. And you can do it in a way that aligns with the standards your team actually cares about—without slowing them down.
If you’re gearing up for a major seasonal event, now is the time to start. 👉Request a demo to see how Cortex can help you get ready—and stay ready.
