An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is the engineering system of record for tracking, improving, and building high-quality software. From services and APIs to Kubernetes clusters and data pipelines—IDPs abstract away the complexities of ensuring software security, maturity, production readiness, and more—all using data from your existing tools.

Software production has become exponentially more complex over the last few years as containerization and microservice architectures have exploded. These design decisions are rooted in aspirations of scalability and speed, but left unchecked, have devolved into data model mayhem, development silos, and environment inconsistencies.

Just like personal health, software health is best managed proactively so you can prevent issues before they occur and avoid costly, stressful outages. Cortex helps you track and improve the health of your software with Scorecards and Initiatives. Scorecards quantify software health by aggregating data from multiple sources to give you a continuous view into the health of your system. Initiatives use Scorecards to drive organizational improvement.

All of the most reliable software is driven by great operations. Your organization’s operational maturity is a measure of how consistently you apply best practices for building reliable software. Without tracking your operational maturity, it’s extremely difficult to know where and how to improve—before it’s too late and an incident causes you to lose a customer.

Scorecards are a Cortex feature that allow you to understand how well your services are doing on the metrics you care about. Scorecards are customizable to your needs, however several are common to most organizations. In our previous post, we shared the top three scorecards that we recommend to Cortex customers. Security maturity is one of the first scorecards we recommend organizations create.

Efficiency has always been a goal for organizations, but recent economic headwinds have made it a priority. Budgets have been stretched especially thin recently, leading many organizations to focus on improving operational efficiency. Bugs, security incidents and unreliable services can all slow your organization down and distract from delivering on your priorities. Cortex helps you minimize these distractions with its scorecard feature.

What support do developers need at large enterprises to be productive? We often fall into the trap of evaluating coders on output, maybe even innate talent. We think that the best way to build secure and efficient software is to hire 10X developers, and get out of their way. But even if the individuals have massive intellectual firepower, operational work grows like entropy in the system.

In the current macroeconomic climate, it’s more important than ever for executive teams and CEOs to make the most of their resources. Organizations are expected to continually deliver innovative products and services in a rapidly changing environment, often with reduced engineering budgets. 75% of tech leaders fear displacement from competitors beating them to market, so speed and efficiency are top of mind.

Engineering leaders are accountable to shipping quality products on time and within budget. But a CEO's historical understanding of engineering operations has been pretty opaque: ships on time, or doesn't. And although DORA metrics are a good place to start, they don’t offer the complete picture needed for CEOs. With new tooling to support greater engineering efficiency, CEOs are learning that it's possible to get a richer picture of engineering productivity, quality, and velocity.

Most Cortex customers begin their journey by populating their service and resource Catalogs, creating their first few Scorecards, and setting up any time-sensitive Initiatives. These features help bring visibility and accountability to internally developed software, revealing consistency issues and enabling teams to act quickly to resolve.