Macquarie Group has put a developer experience daemon on the laptop of every engineer to ensure they have a consistent setup and templates that help them build software and stay “in-flow”.
Head of public cloud Brent Burgess unveiled the tool, which Macquarie has called Dexd, at AWS’ annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
Burgess said that Dexd is several years in the making. Its base capabilities are being expanded in part by “innersourcing” enhancements from the engineering users themselves.
Macquarie Bank deploys code to predominantly two public cloud ecosystems – AWS and GCP – and has somewhere north of 70 percent of its infrastructure and applications in public cloud.
That equates to about 1000 applications “hosted natively” in public cloud, and that figure continues to grow.
Burgess said that Macquarie Group’s vision for its technology operations is “to create a place where engineers thrive” and are empowered with the best tools, frameworks and languages to do their best work.
“We want to take the vast majority of that complexity away from our engineers so they can focus on accelerating delivery for our customers and clients,” he said.
“That enables us to deliver business outcomes at scale across a globally diverse business.”
Dexd, Burgess said, “is based on Microsoft’s Dev Containers”. The concept is that developers use them as “a full-featured development environment”, as defined in Microsoft’s Visual Code product documentation.
“Every engineer has the Dexd daemon installed automatically on their laptop,” Burgess said.
This immediately assists with onboarding engineers, either as new hires or if they move between internal teams.
“Often, people will swap teams, and when you swap teams it’s almost like starting in a whole new company,” Burgess said.
“You have to learn how that team works and what tools and frameworks that they use.
“Dexd accelerates the movement of engineers so they can work on different parts or different applications, even in different divisions, far more rapidly than what they have in the past.”
When engineers open their laptop and go to localhost in their browser, they are presented with a “visually appealing dashboard” that uses a traffic-light system to confirm the engineer has the right setup, “whether that’s SSH keys, access to Artifactory, are [they] in the right AD [Active Directory] group, do [they] have the right tools and frameworks installed on [their] laptop?”
If a configuration is found to be incorrect, Dexd can either fix it automatically or direct the engineer to documentation to correct it themselves.
“That’s really reducing the setup of the engineering experience and environment on the local laptop, [and] it really does reduce the onboarding of engineers down from days and sometimes weeks,” he said.
“[Often], it’s not until a week or two [after you start] that you find that you’re missing an SSH key or you’re not in the correct AD group to leverage a particular service that we have internally.”
Burgess said that once engineers have “the green traffic light for all of the configuration that’s required to start writing software, we then provide [them] with a default set of dev containers or images that [they] can base your dev container on.”
“Once [they’ve] selected the base image for your dev container, we then present [them] with tens of different pre-baked templates for the types of applications, tools and frameworks that [they] need to build the software or the applications that meet the business problem that [they’re] working on.”
Burgess said that, courtesy of Dexd, velocity for coding new features and applications and getting them into production environments in the cloud had improved.
“It’s really accelerated the enablement of services on multiple cloud providers,” Burgess said.
Burgess added that the group would publish more details about Dexd on the Macquarie Engineering Blog at a later date.