
Show HN: Cortex – Living Documentation for your Microservice Architecture - anishdhar
https://getcortexapp.com/
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anishdhar
Hey everyone!

We’re the co-founders of Cortex. Cortex provides engineering teams with
growing architectures an easy way to explore what services exist, understand
how they depend on each other, and unlock additional insights through
integrations with tools such as Slack and Pagerduty.

To prevent knowledge from going stale, Cortex enables developers to define
information about their services alongside the code in a standard OpenAPI
file. Integrations can be built on top of Cortex’s data, enabling
functionality such as a Slackbot that can list your service’s runbooks,
automated alerts when a service your team depends deprecates an API, or a real
time overview of your Pagerduty on-call rotation for a service.

Cortex makes an immediate impact for an engineering org:

1\. It's easy to lose track of which teams use your service. Cortex helps
prevent outages by automatically notifying all of the service's consumers (via
Slack & email) when an API changes.

2\. Architecture diagrams are never up to date. By defining dependencies next
to your code, Cortex makes it easier to maintain your service dependency graph
- speeding up new-dev onboarding and operational triage.

3\. Documentation and knowledge is scattered across people and tools. Cortex's
Slackbot integration allows anyone to quickly find information without digging
through code and talking to stakeholders.

4\. Integrating Cortex is simple - curl an OpenAPI file to Cortex as part of
your build process and the graph is automatically updated.

Cortex is simple to set up, low overhead, and makes documentation useful in
day-to-day operations - instantly improving engineering process. Let us know
if you have any questions, and we’d love to hear from you!

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lumengxi
This is awesome, have been testing it out since private beta and it is a great
tool to help any engineering organization to better manage their services. It
is the system of records of your system of records :)

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chatmasta
Cool idea. I can definitely see the value of where you're going with it. I
like the idea of building integrations and web services on top of this. It's
the kind of thing nobody has time to do at their own company, but everybody
wants.

Any plans to open source the core? Or at least offer self hosting in some way?
Without either of those, it's a non-starter for me and probably a lot of
people. Companies are pretty sensitive about their internal architecture, so
it might be a requirement for some.

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gsdatta
Thanks!

Another founder here. That's exactly how this started - tried to find a
solution and didn't find any, and obviously not something most employers are
willing to invest time into.

We're still thinking through open core, but on prem is definitely on our road
map. Realistically, it won't be available in the near future given that we're
still iterating rapidly; once it's in a stable spot we do want to support on
prem installations.

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neeldhar
Congratulations Cortex team. This is much needed for the Engineering community
today. All the best.

