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Production Readiness
How Cortex Speeds Production Readiness: A Before and After Story
Ensuring a component is ready for production is harder than it should be. Learn how Cortex accelerates production readiness with unified access to critical inputs, standards, and templates.
By
Lauren Craigie
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October 18, 2024
Incident Reponse
Best Practice
Faster Incident Response with Cortex: A Before and After Story
The most time-consuming part of incident resolution is a data problem. Who owns this service? What's it made of? What are the dependencies? Where are the run books? Learn how Cortex cuts incident response time and prevents new issues with up-to-date ownership, reliable runbooks, and Scorecards that drive continuous improvement.
By
Lauren Craigie
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September 19, 2024
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Migrations
Cloud Migration
Productivity
Faster Migrations with Cortex: A Before and After Story
Migration and modernization efforts can be enormous lifts for engineering teams—not in the least because locating materials and tracking progress have been impossible to do at scale. Learn how Cortex slashes time to migrate, while reducing distractions for developers
By
Lauren Craigie
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September 11, 2024
Cortex
Announcing $60M in Funding to Build the Future of Developer Experience
We raised $60M in new funding to deepen our focus on building the future of developer experience. We'll be enhancing capabilities around developer self-service, engineering intelligence, and of course, AI. Learn how we got here, and what comes next.
By
Anish Dhar
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September 4, 2024
Productivity
Catalogs
Workflows
self-service
Developer Self-Service: Overview & Best Practices
Streamline development, boost productivity, and enhance DevEx with developer self-service platforms. Explore key components, benefits, implementation strategies, and best practice for building and maintaining developer self-service platforms.
By
Cortex
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August 22, 2024
Best Practice
Deployment Pipeline: How to Automate It & Why It’s Important
Automating your deployment pipeline helps engineers make software consistent, reliable, and efficient. Learn the steps of a deployment pipeline and how to automate it to increase efficiency and scale.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
August 13, 2024
Best Practice
Security
Building an asset attribution system for software security
Learn how to build an asset attribution system with an Internal Developer Portal, for always-up-to-date reporting on ownership, and security status using inputs from all your existing tools.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
August 12, 2024
Cortex
Development
What is an internal developer portal?
An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is a central hub 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.
By
Lauren Craigie
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August 3, 2024
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Value and ROI
Unlocking Developer Productivity: An Overview of Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ Study for Cortex IDP
Learn about the ROI of Cortex's Internal Developer Portal calculated by Forrester Consulting after interviewing real customers about costs, benefits, and value received.
By
Lauren Craigie
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July 16, 2024
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Best Practice
incident management
Incident Response Automation: How It Works & Best Practices
Tired of manual incident response draining your team's resources? Dive into the world of incident response automation and learn how it can revolutionize your approach to managing critical issues.
By
Cortex
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July 9, 2024
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Catalogs
Cortex Catalogs: More than Microservices
Cortex's earliest use cases may have revolved around microservices, but today's customers use our catalog customization to design catalog and entity types for all kinds of components. Whether you're most concerned with services, infrastructure, clusters, APIs, product lines, teams, or any other object in your business model, we've got you covered.
By
Lauren Craigie
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June 18, 2024
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Best Practice
developer metrics
DORA metrics
Metrics IDPs move: How to measure the impact of your Internal Developer Portal
The dev tooling space is crowded—with lots of promises of increased productivity and reduced downtime. Find out exactly what metrics Internal Developer Portals move, on what timeline, and how to track all progress in one place.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
June 17, 2024
Production Readiness
Best Practice
The CTO Pocket Guide to Internal Developer Portals
Internal Developer Portals have quickly become a baseline requirement for scaling engineering teams that want to accelerate onboarding, improve software health, and increase developer autonomy and productivity. Find all you need to know in our latest CTO pocket guide.
By
Lauren Craigie
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June 5, 2024
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Migrations
Scorecard Series: Migrations without the Migraine
Engineering is always in the process of changing something in their environment—migrating to the cloud, off the cloud, to a new tool, off an old tool, addressing EOLs, and upgrading packages—this process doesn't have to suck.
By
Lauren Craigie
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May 28, 2024
Production Readiness
We need to talk about production readiness
Every software team has some version of a production readiness checklist—some assortment of things they expect to happen before new software is released into the world. But have we lost the plot on what these lists were designed to achieve? To prevent? Deployments are now continuous, but our checklists are still frozen in time (and tools). It's time to rethink what we're doing here.
By
Ganesh Datta
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May 2, 2024
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Cortex on Cortex
Catalogs
How Cortex uses catalog customization to increase visibility across projects
For software tools to be “enterprise ready,” they need to be able to mold themselves seamlessly to the shifting needs of an enterprise-scale organization. In this post, I’ll dive into how Cortex did just that, using our own flexible platform to revamp health and visibility tracking on projects.
By
Darren Schack
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April 26, 2024
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SRE
Best Practice
code quality
Development
incident management
Pocket Guide to Production Readiness (plus bonus framework!)
Discover what production readiness is, how to conduct efficient reviews, and why it’s time to elevate your production readiness checklist to a production readiness framework.
By
Lauren Craigie
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April 19, 2024
Microservices
Microservice Catalog
Beyond Microservices: Miniservices, Macroservices, and the in between
Macroservices, miniservices... mesoservices? Are these increasingly common designations just variations of service-oriented architectures, or the next evolution of microservices?
By
Justin Reock
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April 3, 2024
Generative AI
Generative AI and developer experience
Generative AI, or GenAI, is fundamentally changing the way we work—and that’s particularly true for software developers. In this post, we’ll dig into the evolution of GenAI for dev tools, and examine how forward-looking teams will soon move beyond “autocomplete-adjacent” tasks to get the most out of their tools
By
Lauren Craigie
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March 28, 2024
Ecosystem
Best Practice
reliability
Observability tools and Internal Developer Portals
Observability tools help us ensure system health, but they're just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Learn how IDPs help connect observability data with all the data in the engineering ecosystem to prevent issues, reduce response time, and improve overall software health.
By
Lauren Craigie
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March 25, 2024
SRE
Best Practice
What do quality engineers do?
Quality engineering as a role and function is gaining traction in engineering organizations. But is QE just rebranded QA? Or is there more to it? Learn how it’s defined, why it’s important, and why you might consider it for your organization.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
March 20, 2024
developer metrics
SRE
reliability
How to choose your software reliability metrics
Reliability metrics help quantify how dependable and consistent software is over time, but which metrics are right for your organization? In this blog we'll share a few things worth considering before you choose.
By
Lauren Craigie
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March 19, 2024
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DORA metrics
Best Practice
Engineering Intelligence
Productivity
15 Engineering KPIs to Improve Software Development
Tracking the right KPIs in software development is tricky—leading indicators, lagging indicators, input-based, output-based…there’s lots to consider beyond the marker itself. Here’s a few to get the conversation started.
By
Lauren Craigie
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March 7, 2024
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Development
Developer Experience
DORA metrics
Engineering Intelligence
What are developer experience metrics?
Developer productivity is often assessed retrospectively: if the team is hitting key metrics, we assume everything in the lifecycle before production is sound. But the best teams dig deeper, and aim to solve the problem backwards as well as forwards by looking at the process as well as the results. In this blog, we'll take a look at how a focus on Developer Experience can help.
By
Cortex
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February 27, 2024
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Engineering Intelligence
DORA metrics
Seven Jellyfish alternatives driving engineering efficiency and impact
Jellyfish is a great solution for tracking engineering efficiency. But an experience increasingly tuned to financial use cases has left engineering leaders looking for alternatives that help improve developer productivity, without ignoring developer experience. Here are seven alternatives worth exploring.
By
Cortex
-
January 29, 2024
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Productivity
Feature Highlight
Cortex Notifications: Stay up to date while staying in flow
Cortex’s notifications were thoughtfully designed to minimize distractions for engineering teams. In this post, we’ll outline what notifications engineers can expect and how they can stay in flow for longer with Cortex.
By
Ryan Garrett
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January 23, 2024
Best Practice
SRE
Real Production Readiness with Internal Developer Portals
How can teams reach alignment on ever-changing standards for production readiness? In this blog, we summarize our January 2024 interview with Alina Anderson from Outreach.io, during which we discuss how her team uses Cortex’s scorecarding to coordinate production readiness standards across stakeholders. This article offers actionable guidance for DevOps Engineers, SREs, and managers seeking to achieve more reliable services by streamlining production readiness processes while maintaining a culture of continuous improvement.
By
Justin Reock
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January 19, 2024
open source
Backstage
Best Practice
Feature Highlight
Avoiding vendor lock-in with your IDP
There's a common misconception that all commercial internal developer portals (IDPs) carry an inherent risk of “vendor lock-in” vs open-source alternatives like Backstage. In this post, we’ll share what to look for in prospective vendors to ensure you can move critical business logic if and when you need to without facing exorbitant switching costs, and what additional traits you should look for to future-proof your IDP investment.
By
Kate Huff
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January 9, 2024
Best Practice
Catalogs
Cortex QuickStart
Standing up an IDP can feel like an enormous project—and in many cases, it is. But taking the first step can be much quicker than you'd imagine, with immediate payoff. Learn how to hydrate your catalogs and create your first scorecard in under 10 minutes with Cortex.
By
Fernando Cremer
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January 4, 2024
SRE
Productivity
DORA Metrics: What Are They & How To Track Them?
Despite some recent criticism, DORA metrics remain the most asked about framework for measuring developer productivity. But how can it's younger sibling, the SPACE framework change the dialogue around engineering measurement, and what role do IDPs play in bridging the gap?
By
Lauren Craigie
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December 28, 2023
Backstage
Break up with Backstage (without losing what you built): Cortex's Backstage migration helper
Teams often try Backstage when they have aspirations of “building anything and everything,” but run into problems when supporting “anything and everything.” If disappointing developer adoption rates, lackluster reporting, and never-ending maintenance sounds familiar, Cortex offers a solution for migrating off Backstage without losing the hard work you’ve put into catalogs and plugins.
By
Kate Huff
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December 21, 2023
Productivity
Ecosystem
Engineering Intelligence Platforms | Definition, Benefits, Tools
A new category of tooling known as Engineering Intelligence has emerged to provide a metrics-driven approach to understanding efficiency in your software development lifecycle. Learn more about what this new category is, where it came from, and what tools can help you turn insight into action.
By
Cortex
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December 13, 2023
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Cortex
Feature Highlight
Quickstart reporting in Cortex
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Leaders at every level need a clear view of the organization to invest resources wisely, and teams need to be able to track their progress against organizational goals. However, collecting and presenting metrics manually is unscalable, and building dashboards and reporting from scratch is labor intensive. Read on to learn how Cortex's out of the box reporting can be extended to fit any information use case.
By
Joe Tustin
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December 7, 2023
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Best Practice
Use Cases
How IDPs support Fintech compliance initiatives
FinTech organizations must abide by certain standards during and after software development in order to align with data security and privacy compliance requirements. In this post, we’ll dive into how FinTech companies can use IDPs, like Cortex, to abstract away complexities in standardizing how software is built and maintained—focusing specifically on how they aid in PCI DSS compliance.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
December 4, 2023
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Product Updates
Productivity
Introducing Cortex Eng Intelligence
Today’s methods for measuring engineering efficiency have not proven effective in improving team velocity (or morale). Cortex’s latest product seeks to flip the equation on how engineering metrics are used, starting with where they’re collected.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
November 28, 2023
Backstage
OpsLevel vs Backstage: What's the Best Internal Developer Portal?
Is OpsLevel or Backstage the better choice to increase developer productivity and code quality? Compare OpsLevel, Backstage, and Cortex to find the right internal developer platform for your team.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
November 20, 2023
Best Practice
Accolades
Cortex awarded 2023 Innovation Leader for Internal Developer Portals
We are proud to announce that Cortex has been recognized as the 2023 best practice leader for North American Internal Developer Portals by leading technology analyst firm Frost & Sullivan. This recognition is based on Cortex's strong performance across technology and commercial metrics, from platform innovation and integration breadth, to customer success and organizational growth.
By
Cortex
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November 16, 2023
open source
Open Source Developer Portals
When engineering teams begin struggling to manage the complexities of their software ecosystem, ownership becomes an issue, and developers feel like they don't know what to focus on next... they may set their sights on an internal developer portal. And if the organization has the resources to tackle it—an open source offering may be an attractive option. In this blog we'll cover the origins of open source developer portals and catalogs, and how to decide what's right for you.
By
Cortex
-
November 13, 2023
Use Cases
Feature Highlight
Cortex Initiatives: When scorecards need a deadline
Internal developer portals (IDPs) help drive standards of software quality and maturity, but that doesn’t have to mean a multi-quarter project. Make incremental progress on short- or long-term goals with Cortex Initiatives for Scorecards.
By
Fernando Cremer
-
November 9, 2023
Best Practice
How do you measure software health?
Improving the health of your services, APIs, data pipelines, and other software leads to fewer outages and frees developer time for feature work. In the third installment of our Scorecards deep-dive, we're sharing how Cortex makes tracking your software health easy with Scorecards and Initiatives.
By
Jeff Schnitter
-
November 1, 2023
SDLC
What is an Internal Developer Platform
The last 5 years of software innovation has brought an explosion of architectural complexity designed to help teams ship faster, and more securely. Platform engineering teams have emerged to abstract away complexity for developers to do their best work, with a new category of tooling designed to do just that. Internal Developer Platforms (and Portals) have lofty value propositions but are still mired in confusion around attributes, owners, and outcomes. In this blog, we seek to provide a little more clarity across all.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
November 1, 2023
Best Practice
How do you measure operational maturity?
An organization with high operational maturity can build reliable products and services faster. In continuation of our series on top software maturity scorecards, we're taking a closer look at how to measure and improve operational maturity using Cortex scorecards, initiatives, and out of the box integrations.
By
Jeff Schnitter
-
October 26, 2023
Best Practice
Security
How do you measure software security maturity?
Consistent security best practices in your SDLC can minimize the risk of an incident while ensuring you have a plan in place to respond in a rapid, and uniform way. In this follow-up from our last post on top software maturity scorecards, we're taking a closer look at Security Scorecards—what they are, how to build them, and how Cortex can help.
By
Jeff Schnitter
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October 19, 2023
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Best Practice
Top three scorecards every organization needs for operational efficiency
Scorecards allow you to communicate and make progress on what is important to your organization. Based on what I've seen in my career as a long-time Principal Software Engineer at Workday, and now as a Solutions Architect at Cortex, I've put together a list of the three highest-impact scorecards for increasing operational efficiency.
By
Jeff Schnitter
-
October 12, 2023
Best Practice
Internal Developer Platform vs Internal Developer Portal: Solving for a Central System of Record, and Action
Developer Portals and Platforms are gaining popularity amongst engineering leaders that want to reduce cognitive load for developers. But the lines between these categories are starting to blur, creating more confusion in engineering teams about where to start. Here's our take on how the two differ, which should come first, and why none of this will likely matter in another year...
By
Lauren Craigie
-
October 5, 2023
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Use Cases
Blocking deployments with your IDP
Scorecards help you define standards for production readiness, but did you know you can also prevent services and resources from being deployed if they don’t match standards for security, reliability, testing, etc?. You just need an IDP like Cortex, and a connection to your favorite CI/CD provider.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
September 14, 2023
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Best Practice
What's going on with the Developer Productivity debate?
Whether and how to measure software developer productivity is a frequent point of contention in the tech community. In this article, we discuss the latest thinking, so you can decide for yourself.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
September 7, 2023
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Product Updates
Introducing Cortex Plugins and Customization
Future-proof your IDP with Cortex’s new plugin framework and UI customization. Bring data from anywhere, and extend the Cortex UI with embeddable JavaScript apps and widgets. Provide users with more context on services, resources, teams, and domains right where they need it most, without requiring them to switch between multiple applications.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
August 31, 2023
Best Practice
Establishing a Kubernetes cost management strategy
Many organizations are making the switch to Kubernetes for the promise of greater speed, and reduced costs. But controlling spend requires close attention to what's happening in your services and resources. Cortex helps organizations keep costs in check with Catalogs, Scorecards, and Initiatives.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
August 16, 2023
Use Cases
What's missing from your incident management workflow
Incident management is hard enough without spending 30 minutes looking for the owner of a given service or resource. But it hasn't always been easy to surface this information. Internal Developer portals are helping companies slash MTTR with better communication paths and fully integrated experiences for devs and support teams.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
August 8, 2023
Product Updates
Introducing the revamped Team Catalog
We've upgraded the Team catalog experience to add 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.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
August 3, 2023
Cloud Migration
Best Practice
Accelerating software and system migrations with Cortex
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.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
July 20, 2023
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Cortex
How to Measure and Improve Platform Maturity and Operational Readiness
Working on software infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is rarely a good use of time. That probably sounds obvious, but perhaps the next question is less straightforward: what should engineering platform teams do instead?
By
Lauren Craigie
-
July 14, 2023
Cortex
Product Updates
How Cortex accelerates the process of building your information architecture
This is the second of a two-part blog on things to consider when mapping your information architecture. In the first, we shared some tips on how to approach this process based on best practices from the Cortex Customer Engineering team. In this blog, we’ll share how new and existing features in Cortex accelerate creation of a more resilient information architecture.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
July 6, 2023
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Development
A New Way to Think About Your IDP Information Architecture
The phrase "information architecture" is often used in website design when strategizing how to share the most relevant information, quickly. But that's not the only application. Learn how the Cortex Customer Engineering team uses UX design principles to help customers design their data model ecosystem.
By
Alex Poe
-
June 29, 2023
Cortex
Starting with the Right Foundations - The Cortex Engineering Maturity Curve
The path to engineering excellence has no shortage of tooling for improving developer experience. But what has been missing is an understanding of where to begin. Developed from hundreds of engineering team conversations, the Cortex Engineering Maturity Curve has become a trusted guide for IDP evaluation and onboarding—meeting customers where they’re at for faster time to value.
By
Lauren Craigie
-
June 23, 2023
Development
Engineering
Developer Productivity Metrics: What Metrics Should You Track?
In modern software engineering, traditional metrics to measure developer productivity cannot accurately measure the quality or efficiency of the development team. So here is an article about the most effective metrics to measure and improve developer productivity.
By
Cortex
-
June 15, 2023
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