Scale is thrilled to announce our lead investment in the Series C of Cortex.
Cortex is an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) that was started after a simple realization: engineering teams have no system of record. Every other organization has a system of record. Sales teams have Salesforce. IT managers have ServiceNow. HR has Workday. Yet somehow, engineers, who ironically, are responsible for developing these systems in the first place, have… spreadsheets?
A decade of chaos
The consequences of no system of record start on the day you are on-boarded and carry on in perpetuity. New hires can’t figure out what each piece of software does. Existing engineers dig through piles of documentation to figure out how to deploy a new service then twiddle their thumbs while they wait for approval. Engineering managers can’t figure out who is responsible for what, and when it comes to getting your team to align on a set of standards? Forget about it.
It doesn’t help that trends over the past decade have made it increasingly difficult to keep track of software’s component parts. Whether it’s microservice architectures or complex monorepos, containerization or virtualization, the atomic units of software continue to proliferate and so does the complexity of deployment. Couple these trends with engineering cultures that increasingly motivate shipping the next big thing over organizing the code of days past, and before long, you are in utter chaos.
That’s where the Cortex IDP comes in.
The long awaited remedy: the Cortex IDP
Cortex is the engineering system of record. Each part of the multi-dimensional IDP product works in unison to create a single hub where engineers can track, improve, and build top-tier software.
The catalog
At the heart of the Cortex IDP is the software catalog — a centralized place to track software ownership, origins, dependencies, and any other service-level information. There is always a trade off between shipping fast and avoiding chaos. Cortex brings order at the organizational level without encroaching on the development process, and in the end boosts actually boosts productivity as a result.
Practically, this means that if you need to know what something does, you know where to look and who to ask for more information. During an outage, you can quickly find a service owner that can take responsibility. When a vulnerability is discovered, you know who to assign a patch to and what else is affected. These are just a few of the capabilities made possible by Cortex’s extensive product surface and the unparalleled number of integrations they have with the rest of the SDLC ecosystem.
Big picture, this has a bigger organizational impact than changelogs. When code ownership isn’t necessarily the person who writes it, reviewed it or even the on-call, it’s nearly impossible to keep engineers accountable. With Cortex, we get service owners and with it, means to drive change management and accountability towards org-wide initiatives.
Standards and alignment
With everything in one place, it becomes remarkably easier to measure quality and ensure alignment with organizational standards. Cortex’s scorecards and engineering intelligence products enable teams to set clear, customizable criteria for evaluating their systems across various dimensions, such as production readiness, reliability, security, etc. Data is automatically aggregated to provide real-time visibility into how software and teams stack up. Areas of improvement can be quickly identified, progress can be tracked over time, and it becomes easy to ensure that every part of your system clears company expectations.
Self-service
Developer self-service has been somewhat of a white whale for the ecosystem. No developer wants to spend their time in the AWS console, but when it comes to building a useful abstraction layer, there is a delicate balance between providing ease-of-use and maintaining flexibility that has been a very difficult line to straddle. With Cortex, you don’t have to start from nothing and suddenly retrofit the entirety of an existing deployment pipeline into another framework. The catalog and scorecards get you halfway there by centralizing and standardizing what you already have. Simpler self-service products like templates and scaffolding provide the intermediate steps by making sure new services are created in the same streamlined way. Finally, Cortex’s most recent products for actions and workflows get you across the self-service finish line by actually carrying out deployment via an abstracted, yet configurable interface.
Why Cortex will win
This market is all about category creation. Some of this is timing. Budgets are shifting from IT/CIO is to a new org, Platform Engineering, led by the CTO/VP of Engineering. This organizational change makes code accountability a higher priority. And the rewards for being first movers have been substantial. Cortex created the modern commercial IDP a few short years ago, and massive cross-industry logos have poured in since. Customers like Adobe, Grammarly, and Opendoor are a few names amongst hundreds that are hooked on Cortex and expanding as the product surface spreads. We believe middling adjacencies like engineering analytics will get folded into Cortex, “the platform engineering company.”
Cortex is redefining engineering culture and expectations. We’ve heard it time and again — engineers that work with Cortex put it at the top of the list for tools they take with them when they go to a new company. Cortex is quickly becoming a signal of an organization’s commitment to its engineering teams—a mark of quality that engineers should seek out.
The Cortex team is a force to be reckoned with. Their dogged commitment to the mission is apparent in every member of the company. There is no one better suited to continue pushing the boundaries of the IDP.
We’re beyond excited to be part of Cortex’s journey and look forward to seeing the profound impact they will continue to have on the engineering world.
