Engineering teams are always shipping something—new services, resources, models, clusters, etc. You probably have a set of standards you expect developers to abide by when doing that work, like adequate testing, code coverage, resolution of outstanding vulnerabilities, etc. But how are you actually tracking and enforcing those standards?
Without an Internal Developer Portal, you might find that to be an incredibly manual effort. In this blog we’ll look at how Cortex can help ensure production readiness—through the lens of a common “before and after” scenario.
Production Readiness before Cortex: A manual grind
Meet Taylor, a developer tasked with ensuring their new service meets all technical, security, and performance standards before launch. Without a centralized system in place, Taylor’s job becomes an endless cycle of manual checks, approvals, and coordination across teams. Let’s dive into the steps Taylor might take to ensure readiness:
Step 1: Baselining
Taylor starts by manually checking whether the service’s technical requirements meet the company’s readiness standards. But with no centralized source of truth, she spends days tracking down documentation, messaging engineers, and consolidating a variety of data points. Key requirements like security compliance, performance benchmarks, and infrastructure scaling are scattered across spreadsheets and Google Docs.
Step 2: Team alignment
After Taylor compiles a list of requirements, she needs to ensure each team (security, engineering, DevOps) is aligned. This means sending multiple emails, organizing status meetings, and pinging team leads for updates. Not only is this time-consuming, but progress is hard to track, and Taylor often finds herself waiting on approvals from different teams to green-light the launch.
Step 3: Standards alignment
Taylor also has to manually check that the product follows the company’s best practices—whether it’s containerized, if CI/CD pipelines are in place, or if cloud-native principles are being followed. Since there are no automated checks, Taylor works with the engineering team to verify this. When issues arise, it’s back to the drawing board to manually request fixes.
Step 4: Status standups
Each time a product is ready for another round of reviews, Taylor must coordinate another meeting with the platform team, security team, and product owners. This can delay launches by weeks as approvals trickle in, with various blockers appearing along the way.
Production Readiness with Cortex
Enter Cortex. Taylor’s company implements Cortex to centralize the production readiness process, providing automated checks, real-time tracking, and notifications. The difference is immediate.
Step 1: Pre-Approved Templates for Faster Development
Cortex enables Taylor’s team to leverage and centrally store templates for building new services that enforce best practices for any new product or feature. This ensures that developers are building cloud-native, secure, and scalable products from the start. These templates, combined with the ability to stitch together all the steps necessary for deployment, streamline the development process by giving teams a pre-approved architecture that meets all technical and operational requirements.
For Taylor, this means fewer surprises at the end of the development cycle. Services are ready for launch faster because teams are building with the right tools and standards from day one.
Step 2: Automated nudges
Automated “nudges” for Initiatives mean Taylor no longer needs to chase down individual teams for updates. Cortex automatically pings the relevant teams when a product component doesn’t meet readiness requirements. For example, if security vulnerabilities are detected, the security team is notified immediately and given actionable tasks, like “address vulnerabilities in container X.”
This automated notification system ensures that teams are always aware of what needs fixing, without Taylor needing to send reminders or follow up manually.
Step 3: Real-Time Tracking
Cortex provides Taylor with real-time dashboards that show the status of each component of the product in the readiness pipeline. With this, Taylor can track how close the product is to launch without needing to call for status meetings or wait for updates from individual teams.
The dashboard pulls in metrics from tools like Prometheus and Grafana, giving Taylor a live view of security compliance, performance benchmarks, and feature readiness. If any blockers arise, she sees them immediately and can address them before they cause delays.
Step 4: Reusable Production Readiness Scorecards
Even after deployment, Taylor can trust that her service will continue to align with all standards thanks to the Production Readiness Scorecard that’s automatically applied to her service to ensure alignment. This scorecard automatically checks each service against a set of predefined requirements. The scorecards evaluate factors like:
- Security compliance (e.g., vulnerability scanning with tools like Aqua Security)
- Cloud-native readiness (e.g., containerization with Docker or Kubernetes)
- CI/CD implementation (ensuring deployment pipelines are in place through tools like GitLab CI or CircleCI)
Instead of manually reviewing each checklist item, Cortex’s scorecards give Taylor a clear view of where the product stands in terms of readiness. The scorecard system flags areas that need attention, eliminating guesswork and manual tracking.
The Results: Less Overhead for All
Here’s how Cortex transformed Taylor’s product readiness process:
- Developers: No need to chase down critical information, standards, or templates. All are available in one place thanks to Cortex.
- SREs and Managers: Time spent checking and verifying readiness dropped from weeks to hours. Cortex’s automated scorecards and notifications mean team leads no longer need to manually track every component or chase down approvals.
- Development and Security Teams: Automated pings keep teams focused on what needs attention, with Cortex flagging non-compliant areas automatically. Teams receive real-time updates, reducing the back-and-forth of email and meetings.
- Platform Engineers: Cortex’s real-time dashboards and predefined templates mean platform engineers spend less time verifying compliance and more time optimizing the infrastructure and scaling.
In total, Cortex cut weeks off the product launch timeline, reduced manual effort, and eliminated bottlenecks across teams.
The Cortex Effect: Smarter, Faster Production Readiness
By automating product readiness checks, providing real-time visibility, and offering pre-built templates, Cortex ensures that product launches happen faster and with fewer manual interventions. Taylor can now focus on contributing code, instead of wasting time chasing down status updates and approvals.
With Cortex, production readiness is no longer a chaotic, manual process. It’s a streamlined, automated workflow that keeps everyone on track and ensures products are ready for launch—quickly and safely.
For companies looking to accelerate launches, Cortex offers the tools you need to ensure technical, security, and operational readiness from day one. With automated scorecards, real-time tracking, and built-in templates, Cortex empowers teams to work smarter, not harder, and ensures that product launches hit their deadlines with fewer headaches and more confidence. If you’re looking to uplevel your production readiness efforts, take the tour, or set up a custom demo today.
