Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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 Mend can discover outdated packages and tell you if you’re relying on tools with known issues.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.

Cortex is a developer portal that helps engineering teams create a culture of reliability and ownership. Its service and resource catalogs provide a single-pane-of-glass into critical information about their ownership, documentation, dependencies and third party integration data.

Imagine you’re part of a software development team that’s working on an important new project. Everyone is excited about the work, but you’re running into trouble. The work wasn’t clearly divided up, so some of the engineers unintentionally did overlapping work. Meanwhile, neither the PM nor the engineers realized that they would eventually need sign-off from an external stakeholder, who doesn’t agree with all of the project requirements.

For software development teams to make meaningful progress, they must invest in efficient monitoring, reporting practices, and tooling. This is because only by keeping track of select metrics, such as those pertaining to application performance, will you know whether you are on the right track. Without knowledge of whether the software is functioning and performing as it is supposed to, there is no way of knowing what, if any, changes need to be made.

The software development life cycle is by no means a short or easy process. From project design to post-production monitoring, each stage of the life cycle comes with its own set of workflow-related demands. Teams must develop adaptable yet agile workflows to prioritize efficiency while simultaneously ensuring a positive developer experience. Thankfully, there is no shortage of tools to boost productivity in software development team workflows.

Developers need all the information they can get on APIs to get them to work in alignment with their vision. There is no dearth of knowledge in the software development industry today, but only when that knowledge is documented well is it of use to others. In the context of APIs, developer portals offer an effective way to document and communicate relevant information. In this article, we answer the following questions about developer API portals.

If you have decided to move your infrastructure and workloads to the cloud, you know that there is no one-click shortcut for carrying out the migration process. There are multiple factors and particularities of your infrastructure to consider when planning and subsequently taking the necessary steps for cloud adoption.