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Simplifying Multicloud Developer Experience

Video Thumbnail
ChannelAWS Events
SpeakersBrent Burgess (Macquarie) & Chris (AWS)
EventAWS re:Invent 2025
Duration19:09
Dev Containers Developer Experience Platform Engineering MCP Multicloud

TL;DR

Macquarie Group built an internal platform called DEXD (Developer Experience Daemon) based on Microsoft's Dev Containers to standardize and accelerate their multicloud development experience. The platform reduces developer onboarding from days/weeks to minutes, provides pre-baked templates for AWS and GCP development, and enables a single person to support thousands of engineers globally.

Key Takeaways

Summary

The Multicloud Developer Challenge

Chris (AWS) opened by outlining common developer frustrations:

Macquarie Group Context

Brent Burgess from Macquarie Group provided context on their organization:

The DEXD Platform

Macquarie built DEXD (Developer Experience Daemon) to solve these challenges:

Core Features:

How It Works:

  1. Engineer opens localhost in browser
  2. Dashboard shows configuration status (green/yellow/red)
  3. Click on any issue to auto-fix or get documentation
  4. Select base image for dev container
  5. Choose from dozens of pre-baked templates for specific application types

Multicloud Service Enablement Architecture

Macquarie separates their multicloud approach into two roles:

Service Builders (Cloud Engineers):

Service Consumers (Application Teams):

"By shifting that entire stack providing that in framework in the developer container we can do most of the engineering effort before going anywhere near a shared environment."

Business Impact

MCP Integration

Macquarie has enabled AWS MCP servers and is building their own MCPs for:

Notable Quotes

"Our vision at Macquarie is to create a place where engineers thrive."
"We want to keep our engineers focused on business problems as opposed to some of the challenges Chris spoke about at the start."
"It's not until a week or two later that you find that you're missing an SSH key or you're not in the correct AD group."
"There's one person supporting the platform" [for thousands of engineers globally]

References & Resources

From Description

Mentioned in Video

Full Transcript
Chris (AWS): Yes. So, hi, welcome everyone. My name's Chris. Quick question for the audience here. I know you're all very busy, but one of the things I wanted to understand is who loves installing SDKs and installing containers as a developer? This guy. Okay, awesome. Well, you're at the right talk because we're going to be talking about how to simplify the developer experience today. I'm also joined by Brent Burgess and I'll let Brent introduce himself shortly from Macquarie Group and how they've solved that challenge. So we're going to run through today what do we mean by multicloud. So we talked about the multi cloud developer experience but what do we mean by multicloud? How do we make that experience a bit easier for our developers to build and what are some of the challenges with building across multiple clouds and actually as a developer in general. We're going to hear how Macquarie Group has solved that problem. And then we're going to hear some of the learnings and some of the impact that's had on that organization. Brent Burgess (Macquarie): All righty. Thanks Chris. So yes, I'm Brent Burgess. I work for Macquarie Group. So today I'll just talk a little bit about Macquarie and who we are and what we do and then I'll talk about what we've done to effectively accelerate the engineering experience at Macquarie. So, Macquarie Group, we're a global financial services organization. We operate in 31 different countries. We have roughly 20,000 employees globally. And we're a very diverse financial services organization. So, we have an asset management group. We have a capital management group, trading. We also have a retail bank. So, we have a full end-to-end retail bank in Australia. It's a digital only bank. So, no branches, no ATMs. We've had a cloud first strategy for the best part of 11 years. And our cloud strategy is really about driving innovation and agility so we can deliver outcomes for our clients and customers at speed. And at this point in time, we're about 70% over 70% of all of our infrastructure and applications are hosted in public cloud. So our vision at Macquarie is to create a place where engineers thrive. And so what do we mean by that? We want to empower our developers. We want to give them the best tools, the sharpest tools, the best laptops, the best frameworks, the latest languages in order for them to deliver outcomes for our customers and our clients. And so how do we do that? We've built a platform that we call Dex. So that's our developer experience daemon. It's based on Microsoft's dev containers. And so what does DEXD do? It's about rapid onboarding. It's taking away the complexity of whether you're in a particular AD group, have you authenticated with Artifactory? Do you have Docker installed? Is the sidecar running? All of the frameworks and tools that you need locally in order to be productive on day one. So what does it look like? So every engineer has the Dex daemon installed automatically on their laptop and when they go to localhost in their browser, you're presented with this really visually appealing dashboard with all of the configuration traffic light. And so if you are missing a configuration or something is not right, you can actually click on the traffic light and Dex will do one of two things. It'll either fix it automatically or it'll send you directly to the documentation. So the way we think about multi cloud enablement at Macquarie is two aspects. We have our service builders. So those cloud engineers that are enabling multi cloud services for the consumption by our application teams or our service consumers. So on the service builder side we have a pre-baked template with DEXD that installs all of the framework components so that our engineers can start enabling services across multiple cloud providers. So we install or provide a stripped down version of Kubernetes, Crossplane, Argo, LocalStack and Moto. And then on the service consuming side, what we're doing is we're pre-training a model with all of the services that we've enabled on each of the clouds so that as a service consumer inside your IDE, you can generate a crossplane claim which is compliant based on the services that we've previously enabled. And so what's the business outcome of Dex at Macquarie? So rapid onboarding, it really does reduce the onboarding of engineers down from days and sometimes weeks. Chris: How many people support that platform now given that you've got thousand plus engineers as you said? Brent: Yeah we have thousands of engineers dispersed globally and there's one person supporting the platform. [Transcript continues - see full video for complete content]