Cortex: The One-Stop Shop for Microservice Quality
Long before microservices were ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, Sequoia was a believer. In 2016, my partner Matt Miller published one of the first microservices ecosystem maps, and shared his insights on the then-nascent trend in a Forbes interview the following year.
Engineering organizations have gravitated toward microservices because they help minimize dependencies, allowing software to ship faster and with lower risk. Microservices are the software equivalent of Jeff Bezos’ famous two-pizza rule, which states that no meeting should include so many people that two pizzas can’t feed the group. Similarly, if you want to ship software quickly, your architecture can’t be a monolith. It must be broken down into two pizza-sized modules.
However, just like in economics there is no free lunch, in software development any innovation comes with costs and side effects, and microservices are no exception. One such side effect is that managing resilience across multiple microservices is quite complex. (Last October, I wrote about how Temporal is addressing that challenge.) Another emerging microservices headache is how to ensure that all services adhere to company-mandated standards and best practices for security and quality. Today, we at Sequoia are pleased to announce our partnership with a team that’s addressing that very need: Cortex, led by co-founders Anish Dhar, Ganesh Datta and Nikhil Unni.
The problem Cortex solves is one of human communication and coordination: with multiple teams each tackling their own small pieces of a larger puzzle, it becomes difficult to track which upstream services those pieces depend on, and which downstream services depend on them. Engineers rushing to ship features are forced to rely on manual processes and multiple spreadsheets for information on standards and best practices to follow. Engineering managers, meanwhile, are either working in the dark, without accurate information about the quality and security of the services being developed, or put in the position of constantly prodding their teams for status updates.
By building the industry’s first Reliability-as-Code platform, Cortex is helping engineers and managers alike avoid these inefficiencies, conflicts and costs. Cortex offers an automatically updated service catalog that gives engineers comprehensive visibility into the many services across their company, creating a single source of truth for information on ownership, documentation, APIs, on-call rotations, SLOs and more.
We have spoken with many Cortex customers over the past few weeks, and they’ve told us that the platform is catalyzing a transformation within their engineering teams. At Namely, for example, the service performance data Cortex provides is helping the SRE and Engineering teams align on the production readiness of their microservices, minimizing friction and improving reliability. At Clever, meanwhile, the team says Cortex is making it easy to answer complex questions and track migrations; they call it their “one stop shop” for tracking the organization’s service performance and metadata.
Already, Cortex is becoming an indispensable tool for these Engineering and SRE teams and many others, helping them lay the foundation for a more reliable, sustainable future. We at Sequoia are proud to lead this seed round, and look forward to supporting Anish, Ganesh, Nikhil and the team on their journey.
