Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

New Feature Friday: Cortex & AWS

Most teams treat AWS like a black box. Cortex turns the lights on. We now automatically ingest all your AWS resources—from Lambda to RDS—and map them to the services and teams that actually own them. Daily. Automatically. No spreadsheets. No guesswork. Scorecards help you enforce real standards (think: runtime upgrades, tagging hygiene, EOL migrations). Workflows help your engineers self-serve AWS resources without needing to be AWS experts.

10 platform engineering tools your devs will thank you for

Modern engineering teams are shipping more services, managing more complex infrastructure, and moving faster than ever. But this velocity often comes at a cost to the developer experience. Engineers are frequently bogged down by infrastructure complexity, inconsistent tooling, and a lack of clear standards, which leads to cognitive overload and slower cycle times.

The engineering leader's guide to AI tools for developers in 2026

The holiday shopping season is a familiar ritual for many. We spend hours researching the best deals, comparing features, and reading reviews to make sure we’re investing in the right things. As we all come to grips with the fact that 2026 is right around the corner, engineering leaders are doing the same thing, but largely in response to the explosion of AI developer tools.

New Feature Friday: Understand & Improve Your DORA Performance with Cortex

This week on New Feature Friday, we’re highlighting two new releases that make it easier than ever to understand and improve your DORA performance: DORA Academy Course A guided learning experience that shows you how to use DORA Metrics and Cortex together to drive better engineering outcomes—without the data chaos. DORA Operational Readiness Scorecard An out-of-the-box template that benchmarks each service against DORA standards, giving teams an instant snapshot of where they stand and where to focus.

The most important question to ask in the build vs. buy debate

Every growing engineering organization eventually faces the seemingly impossible decision between building a custom solution or buying one off the shelf. It’s a debate that often (and incorrectly) ends by choosing whichever option is less expensive. However, it’s become clear that solving the build vs. buy puzzle boils down to understanding what you want to be good at and whether your internal build is actually unique.

Get more from your AI chief of staff with these prompts for engineering leaders

Engineering leaders face a constant barrage of questions that pull them away from strategic work. A team lead asks about scorecard compliance. A PM wants a status update on a migration. Someone needs incident trend data for a quarterly review. Each question is reasonable. Each requires context switching, digging through dashboards, or pinging someone on your team for a report. What if you could just ask?

Maintaining Software Excellence in the Age of AI Coding Assistance

In this preview of his AWS re:Invent session, Cortex CTO & Co-Founder Ganesh Datta breaks down how AI coding assistants are transforming software development, and what high-performing teams are doing to keep speed and reliability in balance. You’ll learn: If you care about AI, engineering velocity, or building sustainable systems, this is a must-watch. Full Session: December 3 at 2:30 PM Learn more about Cortex: go.cortex.io/reinvent.

Our Engineering in the Age of AI: 2026 Benchmark Report finds AI is making engineering faster, but not necessarily better

Everyone's talking about how AI is transforming software development. Teams are shipping more code, deploying more frequently, and getting features to market faster than they could a year ago. The productivity gains are real. But we kept hearing a different story from engineering leaders. Yes, velocity is up. But incidents are climbing, resolution times are getting longer, and code review processes are struggling to keep up.

Don't pay for metrics, pay for change: A modern guide to engineering metrics

Businesses today have more access to information about their products and engineering teams than ever before, and the push to be data-driven is also at an all-time high. Engineering metrics can provide actionable insights that help accelerate technology and business impact.

New Feature Friday: AI Readiness and AI Maturity

Everyone wants to move faster with AI. But are you ready for it? In this Feature Friday, Jeff from Cortex shares how working with AI tools like Claude helped him write better code — and why true AI maturity starts with solid engineering hygiene. You’ll learn: “With great power comes great responsibility… and better tests.".

Introducing Braintrust by Cortex: Real conversations about engineering excellence

I'm excited to share that we're launching Braintrust by Cortex, a podcast I've been wanting to create for a while now. After years of building Cortex and working with engineering leaders across industries, I’ve noticed an opportunity for conversations that dig deeper into the daily work of building great engineering teams.

Navigating the path from startup speed to enterprise scale | Braintrust by Cortex

(00:20) The founding journey: from zero to one hundred customers(01:13) Day one: Building the first version of the service catalog(04:25) Why speed is a startup's only superpower(09:54) The mindset shift to enterprise-grade reliability and scale(13:06) How quality becomes a competitive advantage(14:46) High-leverage early decisions: writing tests and supporting on-prem(17:38) Balancing speed and quality in the age of AI(21:21) How AI will shift, not replace, engineering roles(26:53) Advice for engineering leaders working with founders.

Incident Management and Response

In this video, discover how Cortex transforms incident management by automating key processes, reducing response times, and providing real-time visibility into your engineering ecosystem. With seamless integrations and AI-powered insights, Cortex helps teams go from reactive to proactive, improving reliability and accelerating recovery.

Developer Onboarding

Welcome to the future of developer onboarding with Cortex. In this demo, you’ll see how Cortex helps new engineers ramp up faster by giving them instant access to everything they need—context, ownership, best practices, and workflows—all in one place. What you’ll learn in this video: With Cortex, onboarding becomes a structured, data-driven, and empowering experience. Developers can explore your ecosystem confidently, follow golden paths, and start delivering value immediately—reducing ramp-up time from months to days.