|
By Ganesh Datta
This is the first post in our DRIVE Deep Dive series. Over the coming month we'll examine each pillar of the DRIVE framework in turn, and map DRIVE against the frameworks engineering leaders already run on, including DORA and SPACE. For the complete model, download the full DRIVE framework.
|
By Skyler Wuolle
Incident response is a context problem. The first minutes of any incident are spent reconstructing what the affected service is, what it depends on, and who owns it. That reconstruction happens during the worst possible window. The Cortex catalog already holds this data: services, teams, domains, and the relationships between them, maintained by the engineers who run those systems.
|
By Ganesh Datta
Ask a software engineer what they do and the answer, for years, has been some version of "I write code." That assumption is unwinding fast. AI agents can now write code, review pull requests, run tests, and ship to production, and they're taking on a fast-growing share of that work. As agents absorb more of the execution, the human role shifts.
|
By Ganesh Datta
Most engineering organizations already run something they call an operational review. It usually looks like a cousin of the quarterly business review: a deck assembled every few months, walked through team by team, anchored on whatever incidents happened to land in the previous quarter. By the time leadership sees the data, the systems it describes have moved on and the next set of risks is already accumulating in the gap.
|
By Ganesh Datta
Engineering leadership is in the middle of a real transition, and most of the leaders I talk to know it. AI has reshaped how software gets built quickly enough that the operating models many of us spent a decade refining no longer fit cleanly, and there is a great deal of serious work happening across the industry to figure out how these models should evolve. The teams I find most impressive right now are the ones treating their operating model as an open question rather than a settled one.
|
By Cortex
AI changed how code gets written before it changed how code gets operated. Generation accelerated; the downstream controls that turn that output into reliable, secure software at a reasonable cost did not keep pace. The result is elevated risk, distributed unevenly across engineering organizations. A recent survey explains why the distribution is so uneven.
|
By Cristina Buenahora
Platform, SRE, and security are three distinct functions in modern engineering orgs, each shaped by a different problem. SRE was the operations function's answer to scale: how to keep systems reliable when the systems get big. Platform answered a different problem: how to let developers ship without becoming infrastructure experts. Security drew the line on what could safely reach production.
|
By Cortex
Last month, an AI agent running inside Cursor wiped PocketOS's entire production database, including its backups, in roughly nine seconds. The agent found an API token in an unrelated file, originally created for managing custom domains, and used that token to execute the deletion. The backups sat inside the same blast radius as the database the agent was operating against. Nine months earlier, a Replit AI agent had done the same thing to a SaaStr database during a designated code freeze.
|
By Cristina Buenahora
Two weeks before the audit, the Slack messages start. Get me a screenshot of this. Can you screenshot the CI/CD logs? Can you add the artifact names that were deployed to production and when, and when the incident happened? Senior engineers stop shipping. A spreadsheet appears. The product roadmap goes on hold while four people chase down ownership data and evidence that should have existed all along. This fire drill is the symptom of an operating model problem.
|
By Cristina Buenahora
When you stood up your platform team, you probably spent more time on the org chart than on what to name it. Reporting lines, headcount, scope of the first charter, those felt like the real decisions. The name was administrative. Something to put in Slack and the directory and forget about. That was the most consequential decision you made. The name you give a platform team isn't just branding. It's a scope declaration.
Stop guessing whether your repos meet your branch policies. Start knowing. In this Feature Friday, Senior Engineering Manager Gabriel walks through Cortex's new native support for GitHub branch rule sets and how to use them in scorecards to enforce consistent policies across all your repos. What you'll see: Questions? Reach out to your CSM or drop a comment below.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex, to explore what separates an operational excellence review that drives real engineering behavior from one that produces great conversation and nothing else. Shawn draws on experience from SoFi, Uber, and Microsoft to explain why these reviews so often fail—and how to build a process that actually sticks.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dinesh Sukhija, Director of Engineering at Okta, to discuss how AI is reshaping the relationship between platform engineering, SRE, and security.
Cortex Workflows can now be triggered externally via the Workflows Run API (beta). In this video, Solutions Architect Jeff Schnitter walks through how to trigger a workflow from the Cortex CLI, pass context via a JSON file, and run synchronously or asynchronously. Requires CLI v1.15.0+ and the "runnable via API" toggle enabled on the workflow. To enable the Workflows Run API in your workspace, contact your CSM.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Matt Bailey, DevOps consultant and founder of Merge Ready. Matt shares lessons from helping large regulated organizations in finance, healthcare, and government transform their DevOps practices, and explains why DevOps is an outcome rather than a toolchain.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Matt Bailey, DevOps consultant and founder of Merge Ready. Matt shares lessons from helping large regulated organizations in finance, healthcare, and government transform their DevOps practices, and explains why DevOps is an outcome rather than a toolchain.
Engineering orgs track AI maturity, production readiness, incident preparedness, and a dozen other standards. Each one usually lives in its own scorecard, which makes it hard to see where the org is actually stuck. For this Feature Friday, our Principal Product Manager Christine Byun walks through the new All Scorecards report, now in private beta. In this demo: Birdseye showed you one standard in detail. All Scorecards zooms out so you can see the whole engineering org at once.
Every team ships feature flags. Nobody owns the cleanup. The result is predictable: ownership gaps, environmental drift, complex targeting nobody remembers writing. In this Feature Friday, Cortex VP of Product Kara Gillis walks through how she triaged nearly 100 of our own LaunchDarkly flags using the Cortex AI Assistant in Slack. The Assistant queried our internal Feature Flag Scorecard and returned.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Sneha Rao, VP of Product, and Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer, both from The New York Times Developer Platforms team, to discuss what it means to build and operate a developer platform at scale across a complex media organization.
Mention @Cortex in any Slack channel the Assistant has been invited to, public or private, and get grounded answers pulled from your Cortex data. Questions can be as simple as "who owns payments-api?" or as analytical as "what's driving our incident trends this quarter?" The Assistant pulls context from all across Cortex, including ownership, Scorecards, Initiatives, on-call, dependencies, and Eng Intelligence metrics, and holds context across a threaded conversation.
- June 2026 (11)
- May 2026 (8)
- April 2026 (16)
- March 2026 (17)
- February 2026 (7)
- January 2026 (9)
- December 2025 (13)
- November 2025 (16)
- October 2025 (19)
- September 2025 (11)
- August 2025 (4)
- July 2025 (6)
- June 2025 (4)
- May 2025 (6)
- April 2025 (6)
- March 2025 (10)
- February 2025 (3)
- January 2025 (14)
- December 2024 (5)
- November 2024 (4)
- October 2024 (5)
- September 2024 (9)
- August 2024 (6)
- July 2024 (6)
- June 2024 (6)
- May 2024 (7)
- April 2024 (6)
- March 2024 (8)
- February 2024 (4)
- January 2024 (8)
- December 2023 (6)
- November 2023 (7)
- October 2023 (10)
- September 2023 (8)
- August 2023 (6)
- July 2023 (3)
- June 2023 (3)
- May 2023 (5)
- April 2023 (3)
- March 2023 (5)
- February 2023 (4)
- January 2023 (5)
- December 2022 (6)
- November 2022 (8)
- October 2022 (8)
- September 2022 (4)
- August 2022 (1)
- May 2022 (2)
- January 2022 (1)
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.