Developers are builders by nature (and profession), so many take pride in building their own solutions to problems from first principles, often using tools developed in open-source projects. So as Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) increased in popularity, it should come as no surprise that interest in open source IDPs increased in kind. While we may not yet have a fully opensource IDP platform, in this blog we’ll cover the open source components and platforms used to build IDPs from scratch.

What are microservices? Microservices are a software approach that creates applications as a loose coupling of specific services or functions, rather than as a single, “monolithic” program. A microservice architecture increases the speed and reliability with which large, complex applications are delivered. What makes a service a microservice? Microservices are defined not by how they’re coded, but by how they fit into a broader system or solution.

Improving software health, security, and operational maturity are continuous programs—you’re never really “done” maintaining standards of quality. But what if specific parts of that program feel more urgent? Maybe you want to ensure all software has a README file attached, and at least 1 reviewer assigned... by next month? Hey, you gotta start somewhere!

An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is the engineering system of record for tracking, improving, and building high-quality software. From services and APIs to Kubernetes clusters and data pipelines—IDPs abstract away the complexities of ensuring software security, maturity, production readiness, and more—all using data from your existing tools.

Software production has become exponentially more complex over the last few years as containerization and microservice architectures have exploded. These design decisions are rooted in aspirations of scalability and speed, but left unchecked, have devolved into data model mayhem, development silos, and environment inconsistencies.

Just like personal health, software health is best managed proactively so you can prevent issues before they occur and avoid costly, stressful outages. Cortex helps you track and improve the health of your software with Scorecards and Initiatives. Scorecards quantify software health by aggregating data from multiple sources to give you a continuous view into the health of your system. Initiatives use Scorecards to drive organizational improvement.

All of the most reliable software is driven by great operations. Your organization’s operational maturity is a measure of how consistently you apply best practices for building reliable software. Without tracking your operational maturity, it’s extremely difficult to know where and how to improve—before it’s too late and an incident causes you to lose a customer.

Scorecards are a Cortex feature that allow you to understand how well your services are doing on the metrics you care about. Scorecards are customizable to your needs, however several are common to most organizations. In our previous post, we shared the top three scorecards that we recommend to Cortex customers. Security maturity is one of the first scorecards we recommend organizations create.

Efficiency has always been a goal for organizations, but recent economic headwinds have made it a priority. Budgets have been stretched especially thin recently, leading many organizations to focus on improving operational efficiency. Bugs, security incidents and unreliable services can all slow your organization down and distract from delivering on your priorities. Cortex helps you minimize these distractions with its scorecard feature.

What support do developers need at large enterprises to be productive? We often fall into the trap of evaluating coders on output, maybe even innate talent. We think that the best way to build secure and efficient software is to hire 10X developers, and get out of their way. But even if the individuals have massive intellectual firepower, operational work grows like entropy in the system.