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By Lauren Craigie
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.
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By Cortex
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.
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By Lauren Craigie
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.
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By Cortex
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.
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By Cortex
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.
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By Lauren Craigie
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.
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By Lauren Craigie
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?
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By Cortex
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.
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By Cortex
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.
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By Lauren Craigie
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.
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By Cortex
98% of engineering leaders reported at least one major consequence of failing to meet production readiness standards. To better understand how teams are addressing new challenges in production readiness, Cortex recently conducted a survey of engineering leaders at companies with more than 500 employees in North America, Europe, and AsiaPac. The survey included questions pertaining to production readiness standards, tools, struggles, and desired future state.
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By Cortex
DevOps solutions have evolved quickly over the last few years. Software catalogs have bloomed beyond service registries and runbooks into comprehensive, centralized engineering sources of truth. With ever-expanding developer tool sets, can teams achieve the flexibility needed to address this fragmentation while continuing to tailor software catalog entries to their unique domains and contexts?
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By Cortex
While we know software projects are never truly “done,” developers will, nevertheless, often face a long list of tasks needed to achieve a certain level of “doneness.” But to what end? And when do they end? When is done—done enough? In this fireside chat-style webinar, Justin Reock - Head of DevRel for Cortex - alongside Alina Anderson - Principal Technical Program Manager at Outreach - will explore an evolved approach to determining production readiness.
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By Cortex
Lauren Craigie (Head of PMM at Cortex) is joined by Justin Reock, Head of Developer Relations at Cortex for a conversation about meausuring developer productivity.
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By Cortex
In 2023 most engineering organizations have some way of measuring productivity. Metrics like story points and cycle time help us assess team-wide impact, while code coverage and commits tell us more about individual contributions. While we know these numbers don’t tell the whole story, we rarely hear about how to find the missing pieces. Or what to do next when we learn the culprit is poor testing practices versus bad design. What’s the plan for improvement? Where does it live, and who owns it?
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By Cortex
In the last 5 years, we’ve watched the world's fastest growing engineering teams ditch development monoliths in favor of service-oriented architectures that speed time to market. And as microservices multiplied—making it harder to track ownership and quality—Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) emerged to help. But while the prospect of a single portal for developer productivity sounds enticing, veteran leaders know the perception of “one more tool” can make org-wide adoption challenging.
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Cortex makes it easy for engineering organizations to gain visibility into their services and deliver high quality software.
Cortex helps engineering teams build better software at scale:
- Align your team and drive accountability: Scorecards enable teams to drive what matters most to them – including service quality, production readiness standards, and migrations.
- A single source of truth for your services: Cortex’s service catalog integrates with the most popular engineering tools, giving teams an easy way to understand everything about their architecture.
- Build a culture of reliability and high performance: Teams enable organizations to drive a sense of ownership and pride as they improve service quality.
- Ensure new services follow best practices from day one: Scaffolder lets developers scaffold a new service in less than five minutes using custom templates crafted by your team.
Cortex gives organizations visibility into the status and quality of their microservices and helps teams drive adoption of best practices so they can deliver higher quality software.