Cortex joins Amazon Web Services (AWS), enhancing software engineering productivity for more teams

Cortex, the internal developer portal (IDP), is now part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing more software engineering teams to access its software organization tools, adopt engineering best practices, improve reporting facilities, and accelerate overall engineering productivity.

What is an internal developer portal (IDP), and is it necessary?

If you’d like a place to easily manage and organize all your software engineering projects and assets, then an internal developer portal will be a valuable addition to your tech stack. An IDP serves as your central platform for monitoring and organizing all your services and infrastructure, as well as streamlining workflows across your team. It provides a single place for your engineering team to access and track their work, creating accountability, improving productivity, and reducing project timelines.

That’s what Cortex offers — and more. And it’s now available on Amazon Web Services for your team to use. Cortex is your software developer team’s all-in-one management portal for all the services and infrastructure you’re building. It provides an at-a-glance view of ongoing initiatives, including action items, who to hold accountable, and progress status — from short-term projects like software migration to long-term projects like production readiness and operational maturity.

Cortex — your software entity control center

Cortex helps codify standards, manage service maturity, and reduce operational overhead, empowering your developer team to progress more quickly and accurately. Plus, it integrates with existing tools to provide a centralized, actionable view of service health and ownership.

Cortex is your control center for all your software assets (e.g., repositories and infrastructure), providing an easier way to manage ownership and view corresponding information, such as monitors and vulnerabilities. This eliminates the need for manual spreadsheets and switching between multiple tools.

Track progress and quality; accelerate productivity with Cortex Scorecards

One major benefit of Cortex is that with all this data cataloged, it’s easy to track how your team is performing against best practices and drive continuous, consistent improvement. A standout feature is Scorecards, which help measure progress on key initiatives, like production readiness and security compliance.

Scorecards are fully customizable to meet your team’s specific needs and allow you to set priority levels (e.g., bronze, silver, gold) to ensure team members focus on the most important efforts. Scorecard reports can also identify organizational gaps, which you can use to create initiatives with clear timelines for improvement. Increasingly, organization leaders are implementing Cortex’s Scorecard reports in their quarterly planning processes or in upholding operational excellence.

Because Cortex has partnered with AWS, these Scorecards are now a lot more accessible and easier for teams to onboard. It also benefits from Amazon’s more reliable service and precise insights.

Many Cortex users have found its Scorecards particularly helpful for tracking end-of-life (EOL) migrations for software from AWS. This feature helps determine the specific software types that need to be upgraded and the upgrade requirements, and then sets completion levels to track your team’s progress — especially if you have a specific migration deadline.

Something worth noting about Cortex’s Scorecards is the ability to set rules that verify your progress. For example, you can create a rule to check if you’re running the most updated version of a specific piece of software. In that sense, Scorecards are not just passive progress-tracking tools; they actively work alongside you and help you stay on top of things. You can easily track your progress through the “Reports” section, with everything else accessible under the Scorecards tab.

Aside from Scorecards, Cortex also features real-time dashboards that display your team’s productivity, areas for improvement, and workflow automations that can connect tools and teams, as well as create new services and knowledge libraries that your team can access anytime and anywhere. The dashboards are a highlight, as they show the direct impact and progress of your initiatives, down to the day-to-day data.

All these, and more, are what Cortex can do for software engineering teams, and it’s now available on Amazon Web Services.