According to the 2024 State of Production Readiness report, 54% of engineering leaders said poor production readiness standards contributed to a decrease in developer productivity. But how? If software falls out of alignment with best practice—including those designed to maintain the health, observability, and security of software—developers wind up spending more time finding information and fixing issues than building new value.

Steve Jobs once said that giving customers what they wanted wasn’t his approach. “Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do,” he said instead. “People don't know what they want until you show it to them. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” By now, this wisdom has become canonical for companies targeting end-users, but we tend to ignore it when we’re building products and processes for professional users.

DevOps practices have become essential for streamlining the journey from code to production. Development and operations teams work together to ship better software faster. But even with DevOps, getting source code from commit to production can face long lead times and scalability issues. That's where deployment pipelines come in, automating the journey and speeding processes up. In this article, we’ll walk you through automating your deployment pipeline.

Asset attribution is an operational necessity for robust digital protection, but hasn't always been easy to achieve. Especially when software state and ownership is unknown, or inconsistent. This blog delves into the historical complexities and challenges of asset attribution for security and engineering teams and explores how Internal Developer Portals like Cortex can help.

You're here because you’re considering how an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) can help your organization build or extend an engineering system of record, set and maintain software standards, and achieve self-service with pre-approved templates, enabling developers to build the right things in the right way, faster than ever. Autonomously. You might be surprised (maybe not) to learn that the IDP you choose directly impacts the success of your implementation.

Does your organization struggle with slow software releases, frequent bugs, and siloed teams? If so, you're not alone. These challenges are common in software development processes across industries. DevOps workflows offer a solution to these problems, supporting faster delivery of high-quality apps through automation, collaboration, and communication. In this article, we’ll provide an overview of DevOps workflows, explain how to implement them, and offer best practices to ensure success.

There’s no shortage of new developer tools promising to reduce toil and improve productivity. But investing in the latest technology can require a leap of faith organizations can no longer afford to make. Leaders need assurance that the investment they’re making will pay off, quickly.

It's 2 a.m. and your engineering team is sound asleep when suddenly a barrage of alerts start flooding in. A critical service is down and customers are complaining. Your developers scramble to sift through the noise, identify the root cause, and fix the issue—all while racing against the clock to meet tight SLOs.

Are you documenting your incident response process, and are unsure which you should be writing—a runbook or a playbook? Could these be two names for the same kind of document? Read on to learn about two different and complementary structures: playbooks and runbooks. The two are used in tandem, and because the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they can be mistaken for one another.

IT complexity expands every year, nudging up the possibility of unforeseen consequences, such as outages and other disruptions to operations. Runbooks are a great way to ensure your team knows exactly what to do when incidents arise.