One of the main things engineering teams within organizations need constant reassurance on — while they work their magic — is the quality of their software.

As the adoption of microservices soars, the ability for organizations to maintain visibility into the status and quality of their microservices has never been more pertinent.

“When we built Cortex … we understood that different companies have different definitions of quality, but they need to be able to be represented in really objective ways,” said Anish Dhar (pictured, left), cofounder and chief executive officer of Cortex Applications Inc. “I think what ends up happening in most engineering organizations is that quality lives in peoples’ heads. The engineers who write the services are often the ones who understand all the intricacies with them. Quality really comes down to being able to objectively codify your best practices in some way.”

Dhar and Ganesh Datta (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of Cortex, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Keith Townsend in a conversation at last year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Cortex’s product proposition for engineering organizations and teams through its microservices platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Allowing organizations to define quality for themselves

Organizations could exist in a spectrum of stages in their modernization journeys, so the context of quality becomes subjective and unique to the particular organization. Thus, Cortex provides them an objective framework to define it for themselves, according to Datta.

“Quality can mean a lot of things, and so our perspective is how do we give you the tools to say as an organization, ‘Here’s what quality means to us,'” he said.

As a microservices platform, Cortex provides features like incident response through a single pane of glass to the architecture, allowing for teams to align and adopt best practices across the board.

“Maybe service quality means you’re doing CICD, you’re running vulnerability scans, you’re using Docker,” Datta explained. “What that means to us can be very different. So, observability is just one aspect of doing things the right way. Good to us means you’re using SLOs. You are tracking those metrics. You’re reporting that somewhere.”

Getting Cortex up and running

Structurally, Cortex comes in cloud-based and on-premises versions with straightforward initial process, no matter the chosen flavor, according to Dhar. The process begins with a service onboarding flow.

“It could be Kubernetes, ECS, Git repos or application performance monitoring tools; we actually automatically map all of that service data with all of the integration data in the company,” he explained. “So, we’ll take that service and map it to its on call rotation, to the JIRA tickets that have the service tag associated with it, to the datalog service-level objectives. And what that ends up producing is this service catalog that has all the information you need to understand your service.”

With all this data, users can then begin creating scorecards that grade the quality of their services across a vast plethora of verticals, Datta explained. Things like production readiness, security adherence and risk profiles can also be effectively tracked.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event. Red Hat Inc., the main sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, Cortex Applications Inc., or other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE