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.

Anyone who has been reading this blog or who has worked at Cortex can tell you that we are quite passionate about Developer Experience (DevEx). But just what is DevEx, and how does it relate to onboarding new developers? It's a fair question, since the word can mean different things in different contexts. We are even on the record as saying that definitions are necessarily vague to allow for DevEx being inherently subjective to a given environment.

The engineering macro-climate is in crisis. Market dynamics have put increased pressure on teams to ship faster in order to stay competitive, while budgets are under significant scrutiny. At the same time, the advent of new tools and architectures promising high-velocity, collaborative development increasingly lack the implementation structure needed to preserve their benefits. As a result, onboarding is stalling out, incidents are up, and deployments are down.

Software migrations are an inevitable part of running any technical organization. Whether you're upgrading your database, moving to a new cloud provider, or modernizing legacy applications, migrations are necessary to keep software efficient and secure. Unfortunately, migrations are often a slow and messy processes, dragging across months and potentially years. They are difficult to coordinate, from both managerial and technical standpoints, and often cause a lot of frustration for those involved.