The weather’s getting colder, the days are getting shorter, and we’re looking back on a year of change and growth with gratitude in our hearts. As we get ready for the new year, we wanted to share some of the ways in which we saw users expand what’s possible with Cortex in 2022, and highlight some of our favorite new features.
Empowering power users
One of the biggest trends we’ve seen in our community this year is a growing familiarity and comfort with service catalogs and Scorecarding. We’re excited to be rolling out new tools and features to help teams that already have a stable foundation with Cortex reach new heights. Using tools such as Query Builder, power users can now use CQL to query catalog data, enabling them to quickly and confidently hunt down vulnerabilities across all their infrastructure. And with over 30 first-party integrations covering everything from monitoring to SSO and security, Cortex works seamlessly with the tools developers know and love.
We also released a full redesign of Cortex this year, taking learnings from our community and applying them to the user experience. Cortex is now easier to use and more readable, while remaining as powerful as ever.
Supporting holistic service health
We’ve seen that Cortex enables individual teams to develop a deep, evidence-based understanding of their service maturity. But organizations are also embracing features that help define what it means to be a good service on a more holistic level. By focusing on outcome-driven development and process, teams can maintain a feeling of true ownership of their microservices while knowing more concretely how their work integrates across the organization.
Standardization features in Cortex, such as our new Scaffolder feature, make it easy to promote holistic service health without adding administrative burden to developer teams. With the Scaffolder, a full end-to-end workflow for creating new services, teams can now spin up services that follow best practices from day one. And users can now interact with Scorecards through GitOps, giving teams more flexibility to define what’s truly important to them when tracking service health.
Welcoming new perspectives
SRE teams have long been vital proponents of service catalogs and system health tracking. This year, we’ve been proud to also see many new security, engineering leadership, and technical project management teams embracing this technology, broadening the use cases for Cortex and strengthening the product for everyone.
To help integrate these new perspectives, this year we’ve introduced the Resource Catalog. This new feature pushes Cortex past our initial microservice-centered scope to now encompass an organization’s entire engineering architecture. Teams are now using resource catalogs to track infrastructure, databases, and S3 buckets, increasing visibility into the tools they use and how they use them.
We’re also excited about Team Hierarchies, which help facilitate reporting at every level of the organization. Now, teams have at their fingertips the information they need to make informed decisions about system health and structure.
One developer portal to inform them all
When we first built Cortex, our vision was to make it easier for teams to consolidate the tools they used, converting individually-held institutional knowledge into searchable, dynamic service catalogs. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and the ways in which our users have been able to integrate Cortex into their workflows, but now we’re ready to dive deeper.
The next step in helping teams increase efficiency and bridge knowledge gaps is expanding Cortex into a developer portal. Using a developer portal, teams not only have the clarity of information that comes with a Service Catalog, they also have access to tools that simplify workflows and help relieve some of the administrative burdens that come up in the development process.
Tools like the Scaffolder automate parts of service rollout, which promotes standardization and compliance while giving teams time to focus on building the features that excite them. We’re looking forward to seeing how our community embraces the developer portal. Speaking of looking forward…
Looking forward to 2023 and beyond
We’re excited to keep helping teams discover new and robust ways to use Cortex’s developer portal to track ownership, drive adoption of best practices, and define and support holistic service health. We’re already seeing users start to take advantage of Cortex tools like Discovery Audit and Query Builder to really understand environment changes, areas of risk, and bottlenecks, and we’re looking forward to watching those use cases grow next year. With the tools and features we’ve introduced this year, like the Scaffolder, we’re also excited to see Cortex being used to promote efficiency in the development process.
Cortex offers an industry-leading developer portal with the strength and flexibility needed to support teams of any size. That’s why world-class engineering teams at Adobe, Roblox, and Avianca trust Cortex. Interested in seeing how Cortex can improve efficiency for your team? Reach out to team@cortex.io to get started.
