It’s been an incredible year — there’s no better way I can sum up my thoughts as I reflect on 2022. At Cortex, we are extraordinarily grateful for the opportunities that last year brought us.
As the holiday season comes to an end, I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts with all of you.
Internal developer portals 🚀
We’ve talked to thousands of developers and engineering leaders over the past year. Over and over again, we heard about people’s seemingly impossible mandate: balancing autonomy, standardization, velocity, quality, security, and reliability — all while delivering value for the business.
As the year went on, we increasingly heard from engineering leaders that the internal developer portal (and Cortex) enables them to accomplish this mandate. As a consequence, the internal developer portal has become one of the most important technical and organization innovations of the past few years. We were honored that Gartner recognized the significance of internal developer portals when they selected Cortex for 2022 Gartner Cool Vendors.
All of this has been incredibly energizing for our team — the voice from the market continues to strengthen our conviction in what we’re building. The internal developer portal is the first solution focused solely on the engineering organization to exist within the developer tooling landscape. We’re so excited to continue helping engineering teams do what they do best: build software that solves problems at scale for the world.
Our Customers
“Cortex is one of those things where it’s like, you’d never know you needed it until you had it. And as soon as you have the service catalog, you’re like, ‘How did we live without this thing?'" - Matthew Gates (Principal Engineer at 8x8)
Of course, all of this would be for nothing if it weren’t for our customers and users. We’ve been lucky to work with engineering organizations across industries, and even luckier to learn how Cortex has enabled companies of all sizes to innovate their way ahead of the competition.
I want to thank all of our customers for their support, feedback, patience, and guidance as we continue building Cortex. We’re grateful to have you as partners on this journey. A special thank you goes to 8x8, Brex, Pismo, Rappi, SoFi, and Sharechat for sharing their stories with us and the engineering world.
Our Product
Cortex’s developer portal has grown in leaps and bounds over the last year. Thanks to the feedback from our users, we launched a number of mission-critical features:
- New integrations with Dynatrace, Prometheus, and Mend
- Discovery Audit: The Discovery Audit lists all changes that Cortex has detected in your world, guaranteeing confidence in your Service and Resource Catalogs.
- Query Builder: The Query Builder extends the power of CQL, allowing you to leverage all of CQL's power to investigate information without building a scorecard.
- Resource Catalog: The Resource Catalog gives you total visibility into your infrastructure and introduces the concept of ownership into resource management, transforming static metadata into actionable knowledge.
- Scorecards for Resources: With Scorecards for Resources, you can drive compliance across your components on the standards that matter most.
- Initiatives in Jira: Through our integration, you can combine initiatives and your Jira instance to automatically create Jira issues for outstanding action items.
- CQL Reports: CQL Reports allow you to generate reports with actual CQL values as outputs, rather than booleans, for greater accuracy and sharper insights.
Our Team
The Cortex team has grown five-fold this year! We’ve learned so much about working in a remote-first world, and we continue to lean on the principles we shared last year. Building Cortex remote-first has allowed us to work with people that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise — we have team members everywhere from Hawaii to New York City.
We’re hiring a lot more people this year, so take a look at our careers page if you’re interested in joining the team!
Looking Forward
2022 was an amazing year working with amazing people, both on our team and at the companies we’ve been lucky to work with. I’m excited for everything 2023 has in store, and I can’t wait for you all to see the new features we have planned. 🎉
