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By Cortex
When speed to market can make or break a business, the move from monoliths to microservices has become an obvious choice for many engineering teams. This transformation promises agility, scalability, and the ability to more closely align with business functions. It is why we see organizations moving from the rigidity and restrictions of monoliths to the flexibility and control associated with microservices architectures.
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By Cortex
Already a quarter of the way into 2024, we’re seeing a lot of shake-up in on-call best practices. We’re excited to see AI in the mix, but we’re also seeing a renewed focus on existing and neglected best practices. Some current topics in on-call best practices include: In this article, we’ll review some best practices and explore the 2024 trends.
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By Cortex
It's been a decade since Marc Andreessen declared that software is eating the world, and it is still hungry. Customers expect software solutions for every need, driving digital transformation in every analogue industry. Software quality is now fundamental to company reputation, directly affecting customer satisfaction, brand and overall business success.
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By Cortex
Containerized microservices have been the gold standard for cloud computing since they replaced the monolith architecture over a decade ago. The flexibility, scalability, and velocity they enable for teams make them an obvious choice. Yet, a strict interpretation of one service for one function doesn’t quite serve everyone, especially when architectures get large. We’ll discuss how flexibility in service architecture might be the way to go.
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By Cortex
Software complexity makes it harder for teams to rapidly identify and resolve issues. IT service management has evolved from an afterthought to a central part of DevOps. Microservices architectures are prone to delay or missed identification of such concerns. Monitoring mechanisms need to keep up with these complex infrastructures. Maintaining reliability and performance while harnessing this complexity requires a considered, data-driven approach.
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By Cortex
From its initial appearance in the dev-tools space, GenAI has had an outsized impact on how developers approach day-to-day tasks (just ask any developer about when they first started using GitHub’s copilot). While any risks are still being evaluated—like potential for introducing anti-patterns or inadvertently running afoul of compliance requirements, many engineering teams have successfully implemented GenAI with measurable gains in collaboration and productivity.
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By Cortex
Companies obsess over end user experience, whether it is Amazon’s customer-centric innovation or Steve Jobs suggesting starting with the customer experience and working backwards to technology. But as our world becomes more knowledge-based and digital, we also need to consider the most important stakeholder on the payroll - software engineers.
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By Lauren Craigie
Observability tools help engineering teams understand the health and behavior of software. But the term “health” in the context of this type of tooling is fairly narrow in scope—pertaining to real-time performance, reliability, and availability. While these are three important metrics to monitor, they’re lagging indicators of bigger issues happening upstream.
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By Cortex
You might have heard of Spotify Backstage (backstage.io), an open-source option for building internal developer portals. But what is Spotify Backstage? This article will help answer your questions about Backstage and explain important considerations to think about if you’re deciding whether to adopt in your team.
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By Cortex
Quality engineering (QE), or software quality engineering (SQE), is a discipline within software development focused on ensuring the quality, reliability, and performance of software products. With an increase in development environment complexity in recent years, the focus has shifted back from detecting defects in later stages, as QA has typically done, to proactively ensuring quality throughout the entire development lifecycle.
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By Cortex
DevOps solutions have evolved quickly over the last few years. Software catalogs have bloomed beyond service registries and runbooks into comprehensive, centralized engineering sources of truth. With ever-expanding developer tool sets, can teams achieve the flexibility needed to address this fragmentation while continuing to tailor software catalog entries to their unique domains and contexts?
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By Cortex
While we know software projects are never truly “done,” developers will, nevertheless, often face a long list of tasks needed to achieve a certain level of “doneness.” But to what end? And when do they end? When is done—done enough? In this fireside chat-style webinar, Justin Reock - Head of DevRel for Cortex - alongside Alina Anderson - Principal Technical Program Manager at Outreach - will explore an evolved approach to determining production readiness.
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By Cortex
Lauren Craigie (Head of PMM at Cortex) is joined by Justin Reock, Head of Developer Relations at Cortex for a conversation about meausuring developer productivity.
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By Cortex
In 2023 most engineering organizations have some way of measuring productivity. Metrics like story points and cycle time help us assess team-wide impact, while code coverage and commits tell us more about individual contributions. While we know these numbers don’t tell the whole story, we rarely hear about how to find the missing pieces. Or what to do next when we learn the culprit is poor testing practices versus bad design. What’s the plan for improvement? Where does it live, and who owns it?
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By Cortex
In the last 5 years, we’ve watched the world's fastest growing engineering teams ditch development monoliths in favor of service-oriented architectures that speed time to market. And as microservices multiplied—making it harder to track ownership and quality—Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) emerged to help. But while the prospect of a single portal for developer productivity sounds enticing, veteran leaders know the perception of “one more tool” can make org-wide adoption challenging.
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By Cortex
Internal developer portals (IDPs) have received a lot of attention lately. Internal Developer Portals serve as the engineering system of record—providing developers with the context and tools they need to ensure services and resources they own align with best practices for deployment readiness, operational maturity, security compliance, and more. But they do more than just act as a system of record for your whole stack. They also help drive alignment, improve MTTR, and can even reduce cloud spend.
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Cortex makes it easy for engineering organizations to gain visibility into their services and deliver high quality software.
Cortex helps engineering teams build better software at scale:
- Align your team and drive accountability: Scorecards enable teams to drive what matters most to them – including service quality, production readiness standards, and migrations.
- A single source of truth for your services: Cortex’s service catalog integrates with the most popular engineering tools, giving teams an easy way to understand everything about their architecture.
- Build a culture of reliability and high performance: Teams enable organizations to drive a sense of ownership and pride as they improve service quality.
- Ensure new services follow best practices from day one: Scaffolder lets developers scaffold a new service in less than five minutes using custom templates crafted by your team.
Cortex gives organizations visibility into the status and quality of their microservices and helps teams drive adoption of best practices so they can deliver higher quality software.