It is no secret that microservices architectures lend themselves to complexity. This can be a small price to pay when your workflows and processes are organized to ensure that everyone on the team is informed, accountable, and content. Setting up an internal developer portal is one of the best things you can do for the team, as it is an easy, surefire way to get your services, resources, and processes in order.

One of the most needlessly time-consuming tasks that your team members can engage in is looking for information on work that has already been done by somebody else. Perhaps a developer is seeking to perform an oft-repeated task like the creation of a new microservice. Or a new employee on the team needs guidance regarding designing a product roadmap and wants to look at one that was made for a similar project.

There is no denying that incident management is one of the most crucial processes concerning the service and business aspects of software deployment. Not having a robust system in place to address and remedy unfortunate incidents can lead to user dissatisfaction, which can ultimately take a toll on your business metrics. A suboptimal management system can also have adverse impacts internally if it prioritizes efficiency and speed of recovery to the point of neglecting employee well-being.

An on-call schedule forms the backbone of your incident response system in the event of an outage or when an issue is raised. This type of schedule does not keep end-users waiting and helps maintain the reliability and availability of your software. However, on-call management practices often induce worry and anxiety in team members. In extreme cases, it can even be a contributing factor in employee burnout.

Reporting is essential when managing a microservice architecture. Without some kind of reporting tool, it’s significantly more difficult to gain insight into how services and resources are functioning. Software teams need this insight in order to make meaningful progress — without reporting, it’s hard to even know where progress needs to be made. With the introduction of CQL reports, Cortex gives you more visibility than ever before.

The service catalog is an indispensable component of a team’s software development infrastructure. Anything you need to know about your microservice architecture - whether it is knowing who owns a particular service or what another service’s dependencies are - lives inside this repository. Its potential, however, is not limited to being a storehouse for all the data about your microservices.

It is no secret that companies are shifting large infrastructures to the cloud. With more and more companies undergoing the digital transformation of their services, we have been witnessing cloud adoption as a software growth and maintenance strategy for a few years now. The nature of this movement has changed over time, so it is important to ask yourself what cloud adoption looks like today.

With AWS re:Invent right around the corner, infrastructure has been top of mind at Cortex. Earlier this year, we launched our revolutionary Resource Catalog, which integrates with AWS accounts to automatically ingest all infrastructure components, from s3 buckets to lambdas. Through this process, Cortex allows you to track everything in a single place, while augmenting the information that already exists in AWS. The Resource Catalog surfaces live information about your infrastructure assets.

Vulnerabilities are part and parcel of the software development life cycle. If left untreated, they can expose your application to malicious attacks, which can be detrimental to its functioning and reliability. To avoid severe damage and complications that arise from having the vulnerabilities exposed, it is good practice to set up a vulnerability management system. Vulnerability management is a practice that teams should integrate into the larger development process as it helps keep the software secure.

Mend is an automated vulnerability scanning tool that helps teams detect and resolve issues quickly. Mend can discover outdated packages and tell you if you’re relying on tools with known issues. Then, through automated remediation, Mend creates pull requests for developers with specific guidance on resolving those issues. Mend conducts static code analysis as well as package and dependency management analysis to identify weaknesses.