Show HN: Cortex – Living Documentation for your Microservice Architecture

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!

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 :)

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.

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