Cortex

KubeCon is always a great temperature check on what is top of mind for engineering leaders. After hundreds of conversations at the Cortex booth (including a few over waffles at our Waffle House, Inc. takeover 🧇 ), a few themes stood out clearly. 1️⃣ AI is accelerating everything, including the cost of poor quality. Teams are shipping faster with the help of AI assisted development. Leaders told us they feel the surge in velocity, but not an equivalent increase in reliability. More output without stronger foundations is creating risk, not leverage. 2️⃣ The fundamentals matter more than ever. While AI was the headline topic, the most mature teams focused their energy on standards, golden paths and operational discipline. AI on top of weak processes creates noise. AI on top of strong workflows creates compound gains. 3️⃣ Platform Engineering is becoming the quality and reliability control center. Teams are leaning heavily on platform groups for clarity, guidance and consistent expectations across services. Visibility and accountability are becoming the backbone of scale. 4️⃣ Everyone wants to move faster. No one wants to break production. This was the most consistent tension we heard. It is exactly the problem Cortex is built to solve. You can only go fast in an AI first world when quality is measurable, understood and continuously improved. Our biggest takeaway: 🚨 Quality is no longer a gate at the end. It is the operating system for high performing engineering orgs in an AI driven era. 🚨 Thank you to everyone who stopped by, asked real questions, shared real challenges and made the booth (and the waffles) a highlight of the week. Onward. 🚀

AI tools are exploding. But in 2026, the real advantage won’t come from using more AI. It’ll come from leaders who know how to adopt, govern, and measure it. ✍ Our new guide breaks down the AI developer-tool landscape and what actually moves the needle for engineering orgs next year. Here’s the quick version: ⚡️ AI now touches every part of the SDLC --> coding, testing, DevOps, documentation, intelligence. 🧪 Speed is easy. Quality is the real battleground. 📊 Impact has to be measured, not assumed. 🧩 There’s no “best” tool — only the right stack for your goals. If you’re planning your 2026 AI strategy, start here 👇 https://lnkd.in/g9yV_GZ3

🏎️ Speed is easy. Control is leadership. That’s why we’re teaming up with Teleport, Carahsoft, Glean, Spacelift, and incident.io to bring Speed & Control to the F1 Arcade at AWS re:Invent. AI has engineering teams moving faster than ever, but real leaders know velocity only matters when you can trust it. Join us for an evening built around both: ⚡ high-speed racing 🧠 conversations on AI, quality, and operational excellence 🤝 connection with leaders navigating the same challenges 📍 F1 Arcade, Las Vegas 📅 December 2nd, 7-10 PM 🔗 Register: https://lnkd.in/gCdR8Hgu Speed matters. Control wins.

Stop context-switching. Start asking the strategic questions. 💡 Engineering leadership is buried under reasonable-but-interrupting questions: "What's the MTTR trend?" "Who's behind on the migration?" Every query requires pulling an engineer off their work or digging through a dashboard. That's the #innovationtax of fragmented data. The Cortex MCP (Model Context Protocol) acts as your AI Chief of Staff, bringing all your engineering data into a simple chat interface. You shouldn't have to wait for a report to make a critical decision. This is the future of data-informed leadership: immediate insight without the BS. Ready to meet your AI chief of staff? Get started with the Cortex MCP today: https://lnkd.in/gbzUGW9v

New Feature Friday ✨ We’ve recently released two updates that make it even easier to understand and improve your DORA performance: 🚀 DORA Academy Course: A guided way to learn how DORA Metrics and Cortex work together to drive better engineering outcomes. 🚀 DORA Operational Readiness Scorecard: A simple, out-of-the-box benchmark showing how each service stacks up against DORA standards. Clear visibility. Actionable next steps. Better delivery. 🎓 Try it now: https://academy.cortex.io/

The Build vs. Buy debate has one definitive question: Is your internal build actually unique? Most engineering organizations facing the IDP decision get stuck on cost, but that’s the wrong metric. The real cost is the time your high-leverage engineers spend building a solved problem. In the latest Braintrust podcast, Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta sat down with Tyler Davis, a Software Engineer at Canva. Tyler shared Canva's candid, multi-year journey of sunsetting their internal Backstage-based IDP and switching to Cortex. The key realization? Canva's core competency is graphic design, not platform tooling. 👏 “Unless you're a company like Cortex, you probably don't want to be spending your time building an IDP. That's not what your real product is.” - Tyler Davis 👏 Check out the blog where we cover the most important question to ask in the build vs. buy debate: https://lnkd.in/gtsR95Fc

Most engineering teams are facing the wrong IDP dilemma. 👀 It’s not "Can we afford to buy an IDP?" It's "Can we afford to keep paying our engineers to build a version of an IDP that isn't unique?" In the latest Braintrust podcast, Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta and Canva Software Engineer Tyler Davis unpack the harsh realities of internal tooling: 🫠 The Sunk Cost Fallacy is real: Why Canva ultimately decided to sunset their fully-built Backstage IDP. ♾️ The Forever Cost: Building a new feature like Scorecards isn't a one-time effort; it's perpetual maintenance, ownership, and development. 📊 Unique Leverage is the only metric: If the end product looks like what's off-the-shelf, the time spent building is a distraction from your actual mission. This conversation offers crisp, technical truth for any leader navigating the #BuildVsBuy decision. Listen to the full episode and redefine your company's core competency: https://lnkd.in/gArecqvj

40–60% of developer time spent on non-coding work is more than a slowdown. That's a tax on innovation. H&R Block decided to eliminate that tax. At IDPCON 2025, Hariprasad Babu, Manager of Technology at H&R Block, broke down how his team went from a tangled toolchain and scattered ownership to a modern, automated developer experience powered by Cortex. They didn’t just stand up an IDP. They automated the grunt work, the context-hunting, compliance reporting, ownership guessing, and seasonal prep that quietly erodes velocity at scale. 🔑 What Changed with Cortex 🛠️ One source of truth Cortex became the backbone for security, resiliency, SDLC practices, and quality! Giving teams and leadership a unified compliance rating and all their service data in one place. ⏱️ MTTR: 24 hours ➝ <1 hour Clear ownership + automated workflows meant issues landed with the right team instantly. MTTA dropped to under 10 minutes. 📈 Time back to build Governance and reporting that once required seven program managers now happens automatically. Seasonal prep work? Cut by 3–5 days. As Hari put it: “We’re here to get rid of the repetitive manual work so you can focus on the innovative feature development that drives real value.” The takeaway is simple: When you automate the busywork, quality scales. Velocity becomes sustainable. And developers finally get to do the work they were hired for. ➡️ Watch Hari’s full IDPCON 2025 session on demand: https://lnkd.in/gygvQYUT

🛑 Stop Drowning in Data. Start Paying for Change. Most engineering leaders are building dashboards, not products. They're drowning in data but starved for insight. A dashboard that doesn't lead to action is just a distraction. And in the age of AI, where velocity is outrunning stability, distraction is a risk you can't afford. 😬 We just dropped a guide to modern engineering metrics that flips the script: ‼️ Your metrics strategy should pay for change, not just observation. ‼️ Metrics ➡️ Meaning: The real secret? Start with a hypothesis, not a metric. Use Scorecards to turn a standard into a story and run experiments that prove impact. Read the guide and learn how to use metrics to build a culture of continuous improvement (and why you need to measure AI's impact, like, yesterday): ➡️ https://lnkd.in/g4UvGmKA