Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Every so often, somebody in the tech industry proposes a new way to quantify software engineers’ productivity. Most recently, a leading consulting firm published a report that has reignited a recurring debate—is it even possible to effectively measure developer productivity, and if so, how? Whereas functions like sales and support have had rigorous metrics for years, software engineering has long been the exception.

Today, I’ll cover Shift Left Monitoring: A Pathway to Optimized Cloud Applications and how left-shifted troubleshooting of Spring Boot code issues using observability tooling can avoid production issues, unnecessary costs and improve product quality. Shift-left is an approach to software development and operations that emphasizes testing, monitoring, and automation earlier in the software development lifecycle.

To be a true system of record, your IDP needs to be a source of truth for all the data in your stack. While Cortex offers 50+ out of the box integrations, and the ability to bring in custom data, we know there are occasions where you’ll also want to visualize or take action on data sourced from other places including internally developed tools or repositories. That’s why we’re excited to officially launch the Cortex plugin framework plus UI customization. Now users can.

Microservices architecture is a software development approach where an application is built as a collection of small, loosely coupled, independently deployable services. Each service focuses on a specific business capability and operates as an autonomous unit, communicating with other services through well-defined APIs. This architectural style is often used in the context of DevOps to create more efficient, scalable, and manageable systems.

Kubernetes (k8s) adoption has skyrocketed since its 2014 introduction, becoming one of the most popular open source container orchestration platforms for its power and flexibility. K8s reduce costs by improving efficiency, optimizing resource use, and eliminating redundancies. But cost savings in Kubernetes can be tricky to maintain. In fact, a 2021 survey of 178 organizations showed that costs associated with k8s can actually increase from insufficient monitoring, resulting in overspend.

The first fifteen minutes of an incident set the tone for the rest of the resolution process. But what makes the difference between a rapid response and a stressful scramble—clear ownership—hasn't always been easy to ascertain. In this article, we’ll cover how Cortex, an internal developer portal, can be your team’s source of truth to accelerate the incident management process, and reduce MTTR.

We've upgraded the Team catalog experience with the same level of dimensionality as the Services, Resources, and Domains Catalogs. Now users can add more information about teams like relevant custom data, links, and integrations, and drill down into aggregate team activities and performance.

Updating a software version, moving to Kubernetes, onboarding a new CI/CD tool... some of these decisions could have enormous productivity upside for your team, while others carry significant risk if not executed by a certain deadline. In either event, getting everyone aligned with what to do, when—is never an easy task. Learn what to avoid for speedy migrations, and how Cortex helps.

This is the second blog in our deep dive series on serverless architectures. In the first installment, we explored the benefits and trade-offs of microservices and serverless architectures, highlighting the case of Amazon Prime Video's architectural redesign for cost optimization.