What is Cortex?
Cortex is an Internal Developer Portal built to abstract away the complexities of your underlying platform, making it incredibly easy for everyone in the engineering team to find (and do!) the right thing, faster.
Where does it fit?
Cortex can sit atop, or even act as your platform layer—unifying the data, infrastructure, documentation, and automation your engineering team relies on to move your business forward. With a universal data connector and integrations to 50+ tools including logging, monitoring, observability, security, CI/CD, documentation, identity, and cloud warehousing solutions, Cortex acts as a central system of record for your engineering engineering team.
How does it work?
Because Cortex is fed from all of your critical data sources, it has the unique position of being able to actively assess current state of teams, software, and projects—as well as what's needed to achieve your ideal state of engineering excellence. This bridging of catalogs, active scorecards, and developer self-service makes it incredibly easy for anyone in engineering to do the right thing, quickly.
Why do I need an internal Developer Portal right now?
As ecosystem complexity grows, your team's understanding of who owns what (services, APIs, data models, etc), and what their true current state is, will rapidly devolve. And once ownership is in question, so too is your ability to drive change, ensure consistency, or improve experience everywhere.
How does Cortex compare to other IDPs?
Cortex is a fully featured Internal Developer Portal that has been uniquely designed to balance out of the box functionality like key integrations, live reports, and self-service actions, with complete control over your data sources, models, visualizations, and workflows. Fastest time to value coupled with ease of extensibility is a big reason why Cortex has won the trust of the greatest number of enterprise organizations.
How do I know if I’m ready for Cortex?
If you have more engineering complexity than can confidently be managed in a spreadsheet, it's time for an Internal Developer Portal. This is most often evident when you find yourself asking things like, "Who owns that service?" "Why is it taking so long to approve infrastructure provisioning?" "Who hasn't containerized their services for our move to Kubernetes?" "How does our deployment velocity compare by team?"
Who benefits from Cortex?
Internal "Developer" Portal has increasingly felt like a misnomer given the number of roles within engineering that have been strong adopters and advocates! While developers use Cortex to shore up tasks and tools, DevOps and SecOps use it to assess alignment to standards. And while Platform, Infra, and SREs use Cortex to build automations that safely enhance developer experience, managers, executives, and even other business stakeholders rely on centralized reporting to gain visibility into the true state of software and team health.
What results should I expect?
While implementing an IDP like Cortex can unlock an unlimited number of engineering excellence use cases, some of the first "wins" you'll feel will be rooted in the everyday frustrations you thought were unavoidable: Expect incidents and MTTR to fall as it becomes easier to ensure appropriate standards and find accountable parties. Expect productivity and developer happiness scores to rise, as time to find information falls, and ability to act autonomously increases. And expect key initiatives like that annoying upgrade or massive migration to actually be completed when you said it would be.
