Reporting is essential when managing a microservice architecture. Without some kind of reporting tool, it’s significantly more difficult to gain insight into how services and resources are functioning. Software teams need this insight in order to make meaningful progress — without reporting, it’s hard to even know where progress needs to be made. With the introduction of CQL reports, Cortex gives you more visibility than ever before.

The service catalog is an indispensable component of a team’s software development infrastructure. Anything you need to know about your microservice architecture - whether it is knowing who owns a particular service or what another service’s dependencies are - lives inside this repository. Its potential, however, is not limited to being a storehouse for all the data about your microservices.

Managed services and serverless deployments have become increasingly popular tools in the software development process. This means that organizations are focusing less on infrastructure resources and more on the functionality and security of applications. Managed services—such as the applications like DynamoDB, Step Functions and API Gateway that are crucial to serverless architectures—come with associated costs.

It is no secret that companies are shifting large infrastructures to the cloud. With more and more companies undergoing the digital transformation of their services, we have been witnessing cloud adoption as a software growth and maintenance strategy for a few years now. The nature of this movement has changed over time, so it is important to ask yourself what cloud adoption looks like today.

Application development trends guide industries (tech and non-tech alike) toward a more cloud-native and distributed model with digital-first strategies. Many organizations are adopting new technologies and distributed workflows. Software development pipelines enable teams to collaborate efficiently and maintain productivity. However, organizations that were early to embrace modern application development strategies and tools, including containerization and multi-cloud environments.

With AWS re:Invent right around the corner, infrastructure has been top of mind at Cortex. Earlier this year, we launched our revolutionary Resource Catalog, which integrates with AWS accounts to automatically ingest all infrastructure components, from s3 buckets to lambdas. Through this process, Cortex allows you to track everything in a single place, while augmenting the information that already exists in AWS. The Resource Catalog surfaces live information about your infrastructure assets.

Vulnerabilities are part and parcel of the software development life cycle. If left untreated, they can expose your application to malicious attacks, which can be detrimental to its functioning and reliability. To avoid severe damage and complications that arise from having the vulnerabilities exposed, it is good practice to set up a vulnerability management system. Vulnerability management is a practice that teams should integrate into the larger development process as it helps keep the software secure.

Mend is an automated vulnerability scanning tool that helps teams detect and resolve issues quickly. Mend can discover outdated packages and tell you if you’re relying on tools with known issues. Then, through automated remediation, Mend creates pull requests for developers with specific guidance on resolving those issues. Mend conducts static code analysis as well as package and dependency management analysis to identify weaknesses.

Cortex is a developer portal that helps engineering teams create a culture of reliability and ownership. Its service and resource catalogs provide a single-pane-of-glass into critical information about their ownership, documentation, dependencies and third party integration data.

Imagine you’re part of a software development team that’s working on an important new project. Everyone is excited about the work, but you’re running into trouble. The work wasn’t clearly divided up, so some of the engineers unintentionally did overlapping work. Meanwhile, neither the PM nor the engineers realized that they would eventually need sign-off from an external stakeholder, who doesn’t agree with all of the project requirements.