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Microservices
Microservice Catalog
Beyond Microservices: Miniservices, Macroservices, and the in between
Macroservices, miniservices... mesoservices? Are these increasingly common designations just variations of service-oriented architectures, or the next evolution of microservices?
By
Cortex
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April 3, 2024
Generative AI
Generative AI and developer experience
Generative AI, or GenAI, is fundamentally changing the way we work—and that’s particularly true for software developers. In this post, we’ll dig into the evolution of GenAI for dev tools, and examine how forward-looking teams will soon move beyond “autocomplete-adjacent” tasks to get the most out of their tools
By
Cortex
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March 28, 2024
Ecosystem
Best Practice
reliability
Observability tools and Internal Developer Portals
Observability tools help us ensure system health, but they're just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Learn how IDPs help connect observability data with all the data in the engineering ecosystem to prevent issues, reduce response time, and improve overall software health.
By
Lauren Craigie
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March 25, 2024
SRE
Best Practice
What do quality engineers do?
Quality engineering as a role and function is gaining traction in engineering organizations. But is QE just rebranded QA? Or is there more to it? Learn how it’s defined, why it’s important, and why you might consider it for your organization.
By
Cortex
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March 20, 2024
developer metrics
SRE
reliability
How to choose your software reliability metrics
Reliability metrics help quantify how dependable and consistent software is over time, but which metrics are right for your organization? In this blog we'll share a few things worth considering before you choose.
By
Cortex
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March 19, 2024
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DORA metrics
Best Practice
Engineering Intelligence
Productivity
15 Engineering KPIs to Improve Software Development
Tracking the right KPIs in software development is tricky—leading indicators, lagging indicators, input-based, output-based…there’s lots to consider beyond the marker itself. Here’s a few to get the conversation started.
By
Cortex
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March 7, 2024
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Development
Developer Experience
DORA metrics
Engineering Intelligence
What are developer experience metrics?
Developer productivity is often assessed retrospectively: if the team is hitting key metrics, we assume everything in the lifecycle before production is sound. But the best teams dig deeper, and aim to solve the problem backwards as well as forwards by looking at the process as well as the results. In this blog, we'll take a look at how a focus on Developer Experience can help.
By
Cortex
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February 27, 2024
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Engineering Intelligence
DORA metrics
Seven Jellyfish alternatives driving engineering efficiency and impact
Jellyfish is a great solution for tracking engineering efficiency. But an experience increasingly tuned to financial use cases has left engineering leaders looking for alternatives that help improve developer productivity, without ignoring developer experience. Here are seven alternatives worth exploring.
By
Cortex
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January 29, 2024
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Productivity
Feature Highlight
Cortex Notifications: Stay up to date while staying in flow
Cortex’s notifications were thoughtfully designed to minimize distractions for engineering teams. In this post, we’ll outline what notifications engineers can expect and how they can stay in flow for longer with Cortex.
By
Ryan Garrett
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January 23, 2024
Best Practice
SRE
Real Production Readiness with Internal Developer Portals
How can teams reach alignment on ever-changing standards for production readiness? In this blog, we summarize our January 2024 interview with Alina Anderson from Outreach.io, during which we discuss how her team uses Cortex’s scorecarding to coordinate production readiness standards across stakeholders. This article offers actionable guidance for DevOps Engineers, SREs, and managers seeking to achieve more reliable services by streamlining production readiness processes while maintaining a culture of continuous improvement.
By
Justin Reock
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January 19, 2024
open source
Backstage
Best Practice
Feature Highlight
Avoiding vendor lock-in with your IDP
There's a common misconception that all commercial internal developer portals (IDPs) carry an inherent risk of “vendor lock-in” vs open-source alternatives like Backstage. In this post, we’ll share what to look for in prospective vendors to ensure you can move critical business logic if and when you need to without facing exorbitant switching costs, and what additional traits you should look for to future-proof your IDP investment.
By
Kate Huff
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January 9, 2024
Best Practice
Catalogs
Cortex QuickStart
Standing up an IDP can feel like an enormous project—and in many cases, it is. But taking the first step can be much quicker than you'd imagine, with immediate payoff. Learn how to hydrate your catalogs and create your first scorecard in under 10 minutes with Cortex.
By
Fernando Cremer
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January 4, 2024
SRE
Productivity
DORA Metrics: What are they, and what's new in 2023?
Despite some recent criticism, DORA metrics remain the most asked about framework for measuring developer productivity. But how can it's younger sibling, the SPACE framework change the dialogue around engineering measurement, and what role do IDPs play in bridging the gap?
By
Lauren Craigie
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December 28, 2023
Backstage
Break up with Backstage (without losing what you built): Cortex's Backstage migration helper
Teams often try Backstage when they have aspirations of “building anything and everything,” but run into problems when supporting “anything and everything.” If disappointing developer adoption rates, lackluster reporting, and never-ending maintenance sounds familiar, Cortex offers a solution for migrating off Backstage without losing the hard work you’ve put into catalogs and plugins.
By
Kate Huff
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December 21, 2023
Productivity
Ecosystem
Engineering Intelligence Platforms | Definition, Benefits, Tools
A new category of tooling known as Engineering Intelligence has emerged to provide a metrics-driven approach to understanding efficiency in your software development lifecycle. Learn more about what this new category is, where it came from, and what tools can help you turn insight into action.
By
Cortex
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December 13, 2023
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Cortex
Feature Highlight
Quickstart reporting in Cortex
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Leaders at every level need a clear view of the organization to invest resources wisely, and teams need to be able to track their progress against organizational goals. However, collecting and presenting metrics manually is unscalable, and building dashboards and reporting from scratch is labor intensive. Read on to learn how Cortex's out of the box reporting can be extended to fit any information use case.
By
Joe Tustin
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December 7, 2023
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Best Practice
Use Cases
How IDPs support Fintech compliance initiatives
FinTech organizations must abide by certain standards during and after software development in order to align with data security and privacy compliance requirements. In this post, we’ll dive into how FinTech companies can use IDPs, like Cortex, to abstract away complexities in standardizing how software is built and maintained—focusing specifically on how they aid in PCI DSS compliance.
By
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December 4, 2023
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Product Updates
Productivity
Introducing Cortex Eng Intelligence
Today’s methods for measuring engineering efficiency have not proven effective in improving team velocity (or morale). Cortex’s latest product seeks to flip the equation on how engineering metrics are used, starting with where they’re collected.
By
Lauren Craigie
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November 28, 2023
Backstage
OpsLevel vs Backstage: What's the Best Internal Developer Portal?
Is OpsLevel or Backstage the better choice to increase developer productivity and code quality? Compare OpsLevel, Backstage, and Cortex to find the right internal developer platform for your team.
By
Lauren Craigie
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November 20, 2023
Best Practice
Accolades
Cortex awarded 2023 Innovation Leader for Internal Developer Portals
We are proud to announce that Cortex has been recognized as the 2023 best practice leader for North American Internal Developer Portals by leading technology analyst firm Frost & Sullivan. This recognition is based on Cortex's strong performance across technology and commercial metrics, from platform innovation and integration breadth, to customer success and organizational growth.
By
Cortex
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November 16, 2023
open source
Open Source Developer Portals
When engineering teams begin struggling to manage the complexities of their software ecosystem, ownership becomes an issue, and developers feel like they don't know what to focus on next... they may set their sights on an internal developer portal. And if the organization has the resources to tackle it—an open source offering may be an attractive option. In this blog we'll cover the origins of open source developer portals and catalogs, and how to decide what's right for you.
By
Cortex
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November 13, 2023
Use Cases
Feature Highlight
Cortex Initiatives: When scorecards need a deadline
Internal developer portals (IDPs) help drive standards of software quality and maturity, but that doesn’t have to mean a multi-quarter project. Make incremental progress on short- or long-term goals with Cortex Initiatives for Scorecards.
By
Fernando Cremer
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November 9, 2023
Cortex
Development
What is an internal developer portal?
An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is a central hub 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.
By
Lauren Craigie
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November 2, 2023
Best Practice
How do you measure software health?
Improving the health of your services, APIs, data pipelines, and other software leads to fewer outages and frees developer time for feature work. In the third installment of our Scorecards deep-dive, we're sharing how Cortex makes tracking your software health easy with Scorecards and Initiatives.
By
Jeff Schnitter
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November 1, 2023
SDLC
What is an Internal Developer Platform
The last 5 years of software innovation has brought an explosion of architectural complexity designed to help teams ship faster, and more securely. Platform engineering teams have emerged to abstract away complexity for developers to do their best work, with a new category of tooling designed to do just that. Internal Developer Platforms (and Portals) have lofty value propositions but are still mired in confusion around attributes, owners, and outcomes. In this blog, we seek to provide a little more clarity across all.
By
Cortex
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November 1, 2023
Best Practice
How do you measure operational maturity?
An organization with high operational maturity can build reliable products and services faster. In continuation of our series on top software maturity scorecards, we're taking a closer look at how to measure and improve operational maturity using Cortex scorecards, initiatives, and out of the box integrations.
By
Jeff Schnitter
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October 26, 2023
Best Practice
Security
How do you measure software security maturity?
Consistent security best practices in your SDLC can minimize the risk of an incident while ensuring you have a plan in place to respond in a rapid, and uniform way. In this follow-up from our last post on top software maturity scorecards, we're taking a closer look at Security Scorecards—what they are, how to build them, and how Cortex can help.
By
Jeff Schnitter
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October 19, 2023
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Best Practice
Top three scorecards every organization needs for operational efficiency
Scorecards allow you to communicate and make progress on what is important to your organization. Based on what I've seen in my career as a long-time Principal Software Engineer at Workday, and now as a Solutions Architect at Cortex, I've put together a list of the three highest-impact scorecards for increasing operational efficiency.
By
Jeff Schnitter
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October 12, 2023
Best Practice
Internal Developer Platform vs Internal Developer Portal: Solving for a Central System of Record, and Action
Developer Portals and Platforms are gaining popularity amongst engineering leaders that want to reduce cognitive load for developers. But the lines between these categories are starting to blur, creating more confusion in engineering teams about where to start. Here's our take on how the two differ, which should come first, and why none of this will likely matter in another year...
By
Cortex
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October 5, 2023
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Use Cases
Blocking deployments with your IDP
Scorecards help you define standards for production readiness, but did you know you can also prevent services and resources from being deployed if they don’t match standards for security, reliability, testing, etc?. You just need an IDP like Cortex, and a connection to your favorite CI/CD provider.
By
Cortex
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September 14, 2023
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Product Updates
Introducing Cortex Plugins and Customization
Future-proof your IDP with Cortex’s new plugin framework and UI customization. Bring data from anywhere, and extend the Cortex UI with embeddable JavaScript apps and widgets. Provide users with more context on services, resources, teams, and domains right where they need it most, without requiring them to switch between multiple applications.
By
Lauren Craigie
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August 31, 2023
Best Practice
Establishing a Kubernetes cost management strategy
Many organizations are making the switch to Kubernetes for the promise of greater speed, and reduced costs. But controlling spend requires close attention to what's happening in your services and resources. Cortex helps organizations keep costs in check with Catalogs, Scorecards, and Initiatives.
By
Cortex
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August 16, 2023
Use Cases
What's missing from your incident management workflow
Incident management is hard enough without spending 30 minutes looking for the owner of a given service or resource. But it hasn't always been easy to surface this information. Internal Developer portals are helping companies slash MTTR with better communication paths and fully integrated experiences for devs and support teams.
By
Cortex
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August 8, 2023
Product Updates
Introducing the revamped Team Catalog
We've upgraded the Team catalog experience to add the same level of dimensionality as the Services, Resources, and Domains Catalogs. Now users can add more information about teams like relevant custom data, links, and integrations, and drill down into aggregate team activities and performance.
By
Lauren Craigie
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August 3, 2023
Cloud Migration
Best Practice
Accelerating software and system migrations with Cortex
Updating a software version, moving to Kubernetes, onboarding a new CI/CD tool... some of these decisions could have enormous productivity upside for your team, while others carry significant risk if not executed by a certain deadline. In either event, getting everyone aligned with what to do, when—is never an easy task. Learn what to avoid for speedy migrations, and how Cortex helps.
By
Cortex
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July 20, 2023
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Cortex
How to Measure and Improve Platform Maturity and Operational Readiness
Working on software infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is rarely a good use of time. That probably sounds obvious, but perhaps the next question is less straightforward: what should engineering platform teams do instead?
By
Cortex
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July 14, 2023
Cortex
Product Updates
How Cortex accelerates the process of building your information architecture
This is the second of a two-part blog on things to consider when mapping your information architecture. In the first, we shared some tips on how to approach this process based on best practices from the Cortex Customer Engineering team. In this blog, we’ll share how new and existing features in Cortex accelerate creation of a more resilient information architecture.
By
Lauren Craigie
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July 6, 2023
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Development
A New Way to Think About Your IDP Information Architecture
The phrase "information architecture" is often used in website design when strategizing how to share the most relevant information, quickly. But that's not the only application. Learn how the Cortex Customer Engineering team uses UX design principles to help customers design their data model ecosystem.
By
Alex Poe
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June 29, 2023
Cortex
Starting with the Right Foundations - The Cortex Engineering Maturity Curve
The path to engineering excellence has no shortage of tooling for improving developer experience. But what has been missing is an understanding of where to begin. Developed from hundreds of engineering team conversations, the Cortex Engineering Maturity Curve has become a trusted guide for IDP evaluation and onboarding—meeting customers where they’re at for faster time to value.
By
Lauren Craigie
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June 23, 2023
Development
Engineering
Metrics for measuring developer productivity
In modern software engineering, traditional metrics to measure developer productivity cannot accurately measure the quality or efficiency of the development team. So here is an article about the most effective metrics to measure and improve developer productivity.
By
Cortex
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June 15, 2023
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Development
Engineering
Building a developer homepage: a one-stop shop for developers
In this comprehensive guide, a Cortex engineer shares the essential steps in building and implementing a developer homepage. Learn how this feature can streamline the developer’s workflow, funneling important and actionable information to your team members.
By
Ishan Mundra
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June 7, 2023
Cortex
Business
A new standard for Internal Developer Portals - Putting our new Series B financing to work
Cortex has raised $35m in Series B financing. New investor IVP led the round alongside Craft Ventures, with participation from existing investors Sequoia, Tiger Global, and YCombinator. Cack Wilhelm of IVP joined our board.
By
Anish Dhar
-
May 31, 2023
SRE
Development
Developer productivity and how SREs can track it better
We’ve put together this guide to help SREs boost developer productivity by enhancing collaboration, strengthening infrastructure, and streamlining processes. Read on to discover the importance of strong developer productivity in SRE and insights into achieving a more effective software development life cycle in your organization.
By
Cortex
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May 17, 2023
Development
Improving engineering velocity with internal developer portals
Internal developer portals can improve your engineering velocity and provide valuable insights into your team’s performance. Learn how developer portals can enhance collaboration, streamline processes and optimize workflows, ultimately resulting in better software development and faster delivery times.
By
Cortex
-
May 10, 2023
Development
Why Scorecards are critical to your developer portal
Resource Scorecards help to drive the adoption of the best coding standards, improve code quality, and foster innovation. You can enhance visibility, compliance, and decision-making across your company by using Cortex’s Scorecards.
By
Cortex
-
April 27, 2023
Security
SRE
It’s RSAC 2023—and it’s time to think about a shift left for security and SRE tools
The annual RSA conference is here, providing a great opportunity to evaluate the latest trends in security and reliability. One area to explore? Developer tools, which promote best practices and compliance early on in the software development lifecycle.
By
Cortex
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April 20, 2023
Security
Different types of code security practices
Developers can protect software applications from unauthorized access, modification, and exploitation by implementing different types of code security practices, such as white-box and black-box testing, static and dynamic application security testing, and software composition analysis. Read on to learn more.
By
Cortex
-
April 13, 2023
Kubernetes
Why Cortex and Kubernetes belong together
Kubernetes gives developers autonomy and allows them to work faster, and as a result, standardization can fall by the wayside. Learn how Cortex can help you introduce consistency into your k8s practice, and make sure to visit us at KubeCon this month!
By
Cortex
-
April 6, 2023
Engineering
Measuring and promoting engineering productivity
Measuring engineering productivity can be a great way to understand where teams could benefit most from support. Use holistic metrics to measure productivity across your team, and leverage workflow tools to empower teams to be more productive.
By
Cortex
-
March 30, 2023
SRE
Cortex
How Cortex can help SRE teams amplify their reach
Site reliability engineers can amplify their reach and influence across teams with Cortex in their toolbox. With the ability to define clear standards and drive progress, Cortex enables everyone at an organization to adopt an SRE mindset. Make sure to visit us at SREcon to learn more about how Cortex can serve as a single source of truth for your SRE team!
By
Cortex
-
March 16, 2023
Development
Best practices for DevOps teams
DevOps teams improve efficiency and reliability in development workflows, helping engineers spend less time building processes from scratch and more time programming. These best practices will set your DevOps team in the right direction.
By
Cortex
-
March 2, 2023
Development
Engineering
Testing
Developer environments done right
Developer environments can streamline testing, and can encourage experimentation and creativity from engineers and non-engineers alike. In this article, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of developer environments, and dive into best practices for those who adopt them.
By
Aditya Bansal
-
February 23, 2023
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Cortex
Product Updates
Introducing Actions
With the introduction of Actions, the self-serve Cortex internal developer portal has become even more powerful. Now, Cortex users can deploy services, provision resources, and get temporary access keys — among other things — all in one place.
By
Cortex
-
February 13, 2023
SRE
Development
SRE Dashboards
SRE dashboards provide a high-level overview of applications, deployments, or code tiers within selected environments. Read on to learn the different types of SRE dashboards, why they're important, and how to integrate this vital tool into your SRE system.
By
Cortex
-
January 26, 2023
Development
Business
A guide to successfully onboarding a developer
A good onboarding process should give a new developer the tools they need for success and autonomy. In this guide, we’ll take a look at a few key parts of welcoming new team members into your organization.
By
Cortex
-
January 12, 2023
Cortex
2022 at Cortex: A year in review from our CTO
As we kick off 2023, we're reflecting on all of the incredible opportunities last year brought us. From the advancement of internal developer portals to the expansion of our platform, 2022 was a year of growth. We can’t wait to see what this year brings!
By
Ganesh Datta
-
January 5, 2023
Microservices
Development
Manage your APIs from your internal developer portal
The internal developer portal links various parts of your architecture, including microservices, dependencies, and resources. In this article, we'll cover how you can manage your APIs from a dev portal, too.
By
Cortex
-
December 15, 2022
Development
Microservices
Getting internal documentation right
With internal documentation, developers can keep track of various processes, making it easier to share knowledge and get new team members up to speed. Learn more about how to get this necessary practice right with your organization.
By
Cortex
-
December 13, 2022
Development
Microservices
Taking incident management to the next level with an internal developer portal
A developer portal provides easy access to information about microservices and resources, enabling your teams to respond quickly to unexpected issues. Read on to learn why internal developer portals are an essential part of every incident management strategy.
By
Cortex
-
December 8, 2022
Development
Microservices
Best practices for on-call scheduling and management
Properly setting up on-call scheduling systems creates arrangements that ensure developers are available to maintain and improve the microservices infrastructure. In this article, we'll discuss some best practices for scheduling and managing employee on-call systems.
By
Cortex
-
December 6, 2022
Cloud Migration
Business
This year's major trends in cloud migration
Recent years have seen a large number of companies pouring an extraordinary amount of resources into moving their applications to the cloud. Read this piece to learn about cloud migration trends in 2022.
By
Cortex
-
November 17, 2022
Integration
Cortex
How integrating AWS into Cortex augments visibility into your infrastructure
With the Resource Catalog, Cortex can augment all the vital data you have in AWS, while providing even greater visibility into your infrastructure. Learn more about how to get the most out of AWS by integrating with Cortex, and make sure to stop by our kiosk at re:Invent.
By
Cortex
-
November 15, 2022
Security
Microservices
Effective vulnerability management for your microservices
Security vulnerabilities expose software to malicious attacks that compromise data or damage the system, making vulnerability management a crucial part of working with microservices. Read on to learn effective strategies for managing vulnerabilities.
By
Cortex
-
November 10, 2022
Business
Engineering
The underappreciated power of technical project managers
Technical project managers play a vital role in engineering organizations, but the manual work of tracking progress can get in the way of their impact. Cortex helps TPMs focus on what really matters.
By
Cortex
-
November 3, 2022
Kubernetes
Cortex
How Cortex can help you get the most out of Kubernetes
By providing you with unparalleled visibility into your services and infrastructure components, Cortex can help you get the most out of Kubernetes. The service and resource catalogs backed by the power of scorecarding not only provide deep insights, but allow you to establish and enforce best Kubernetes practices.
By
Cortex
-
October 18, 2022
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Integration
Cortex
How Cortex can help you get the most out of Datadog
Cortex is uniquely equipped to augment Datadog’s observability tools, providing deeper insights and greater visibility into your services. Learn more about how Cortex can help you maximize your APM tools, and make sure to stop by our booth at Datadog’s Dash conference.
By
Cortex
-
October 4, 2022
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