Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You're here because you’re considering how an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) can help your organization build or extend an engineering system of record, set and maintain software standards, and achieve self-service with pre-approved templates, enabling developers to build the right things in the right way, faster than ever. Autonomously. You might be surprised (maybe not) to learn that the IDP you choose directly impacts the success of your implementation.

Does your organization struggle with slow software releases, frequent bugs, and siloed teams? If so, you're not alone. These challenges are common in software development processes across industries. DevOps workflows offer a solution to these problems, supporting faster delivery of high-quality apps through automation, collaboration, and communication. In this article, we’ll provide an overview of DevOps workflows, explain how to implement them, and offer best practices to ensure success.

There’s no shortage of new developer tools promising to reduce toil and improve productivity. But investing in the latest technology can require a leap of faith organizations can no longer afford to make. Leaders need assurance that the investment they’re making will pay off, quickly.

It's 2 a.m. and your engineering team is sound asleep when suddenly a barrage of alerts start flooding in. A critical service is down and customers are complaining. Your developers scramble to sift through the noise, identify the root cause, and fix the issue—all while racing against the clock to meet tight SLOs.

Are you documenting your incident response process, and are unsure which you should be writing—a runbook or a playbook? Could these be two names for the same kind of document? Read on to learn about two different and complementary structures: playbooks and runbooks. The two are used in tandem, and because the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they can be mistaken for one another.

IT complexity expands every year, nudging up the possibility of unforeseen consequences, such as outages and other disruptions to operations. Runbooks are a great way to ensure your team knows exactly what to do when incidents arise.

DevOps uses software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) philosophies and practices to shorten the software development lifecycle (SDLC), provide continuous delivery of products, and maintain high software quality. Engineers who tackle slow deployment problems, communication bottlenecks between development and operations teams, and manual and error-prone engineering processes and tasks are doing DevOps work.

Cortex is an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) that reduces friction in developing software that stays aligned to standards of excellence. While all IDPs offer some cataloging functionality, the ability of that catalog to match existing business logic can mean the difference between a true system of record, and yet-another--tool.

Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) have increasingly found their way to the center of engineering operations. As the new engineering system of record, IDPs make it possible to align and enforce standards while unlocking safe developer self-service. Of course, oft-cited benefits like removing friction and improving consistency might feel intangible or even duplicative to other tools in your stack. So how should engineering leaders think about evaluating IDPs?

Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools enable the automation of cloud infrastructure and IT infrastructure deployment and management. These configuration management tools allow DevOps teams and development teams to define computing infrastructure resources as code in configuration files, use version control systems like GitHub, and deploy infrastructure consistently across different environments, from on-premises data centers to cloud services.