Company overview
Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps revenue teams manage their entire go-to-market workflow. With hundreds of microservices, a fast-growing team and a constantly expanding platform with multiple product surfaces, engineering operations was top of mind for them.
Key wins:
Gain 100% visibility into a complex, 100+ service migration, tracking real-time progress against a hard deadline.
Proactively identify and support lagging teams, ensuring no service was left behind.
Eliminate the stress and chaos typically associated with time-sensitive migrations, allowing teams to maintain their regular development pace.
Provide leadership with confident, data-backed updates, replacing anxiety with accurate progress reports.
The Challenge: A high-stakes migration with a mission-critical deadline
When Google announced it was deprecating its Container Registry (GCR), hundreds of companies were forced into a time-sensitive migration. For Outreach, this wasn't just an inconvenience. It was a high-stakes project with a non-negotiable deadline. Failure to migrate meant their teams would no longer be able to deploy code.
The challenge exposed a problem that goes far beyond the migration itself. Outreach had no centralized way to track org-wide progress, enforce standards, or proactively identify risk. It was a window into a broader truth: engineering teams wereare often flying blind when it came to operational visibility.
By leaning into an Engineering Operations mindset and leveraging Cortex, Egor Kalinichev, Engineering Manager for the Dev Tooling team, turned a potential fire drill into a calm, data-driven initiative:
"If we did not have anything at all, administrative methods would be our only choice. I would be writing to all the managers telling them if they didn't do what we asked, they wouldn't be able to deploy."
— Egor Kalinichev, Engineering Manager, Outreach
The old approach would have created exactly the kind of friction that slows engineering organizations down: managers scrambling, developers interrupted, and no one with a clear picture of where things stood.
The Solution: Engineering operations in action
Egor turned to Cortex to build the engineering operations foundation his team needed.
He created a custom Scorecard called "ECR Readiness" that became the single source of truth for the entire migration. Using Cortex Query Language (CQL), the Scorecard parsed version data from each service's repository to automatically determine whether it had been updated for ECR compatibility.
This gave them a complete overview in real time of the entire organization, broken down by team and service. This is EngOps in practice: using data and automation to eliminate the guesswork, surface exactly where the bottlenecks are, and make it easy for every team to follow best practices.
"The scorecard was able to give me a report of who already has the latest version and will survive the shutdown of the container registry, and more importantly, who will not. I was able to dial down on who were the biggest offenders, who were slow to upgrade, and who I needed to help."
— Egor Kalinichev, Engineering Manager, Outreach
With this operational clarity, Egor knew exactly which teams to contact, which services needed attention, and could even identify recently inherited services where new owners might not yet be aware of the migration requirements. Leadership, in turn, received confident, data-driven progress updates, replacing chaos with accuracy.
The Result: A two-month migration, zero mayhem
The most significant outcome was the reduction of friction across the entire engineering org.
What could have easily become a high-pressure, all-hands fire drill instead played out as a calm, well-paced initiative over two months. Teams maintained their regular development cadence. No projects were derailed. No one was ambushed with last-minute demands.
This is what a strong Engineering Operations function delivers: the ability for the organization to continuously improve without grinding to a halt. The migration succeeded not because of heroics, but because the operational foundation was in place to manage it well.
For a Dev Tooling team supporting 300 engineers, the value is tangible.
"If I had to choose between hiring one more person or purchasing Cortex, it would be an easy choice: Cortex definitely makes a bigger difference."
— Egor Kalinichev, Engineering Manager, Outreach
Building a continuous improvement loop
The ECR migration was a proving ground and its success has accelerated Outreach's EngOps ambitions.
The team is now integrating the Cortex API directly into their CI pipeline, automatically pushing module version data to the Service Catalog. This removes manual effort from future initiatives entirely, enabling proactive nudges to teams and continuous improvement of codebase health and security.
It's a model for how EngOps should work: every initiative builds institutional knowledge, every automation reduces future friction, and the engineering organization gets measurably better over time.
"This is the angle we look at Cortex from right now. We can utilize it so much more and improve the developer experience so much more. So that's what we're going for."
— Egor Kalinichev, Engineering Manager, Outreach
Ready to build the operational foundation your engineering org needs? Book a demo to see how Cortex can help.
