Macquarie Bank to scope Openstack private cloud

Macquarie Bank has revealed plans to design a private cloud environment based on Openstack open source technology.

The corporate operations group – which houses Macquarie’s technology operations – will work with a “large”, undisclosed, “world leading IT vendor” to design the private cloud, which it said will be “based on an outsourced IaaS model”.

“Our team has approval to design a new private cloud outsourced infrastructure based on Openstack technology,” Macquarie said.

“We will work collaboratively with our on-premise infrastructure, developer and operations teams, as well as with a large world leading IT vendor to document requirements for the private cloud solution, complete high and detailed level designs [and] negotiate contracts to support the technology and processes.”

Comment has been sought from a Macquarie spokesperson to confirm the identity of the vendor partner on the project, as well as the purpose of the private cloud environment.

The bank appeared to suggest that the private cloud could form part of a larger platform-as-a-service drive that it has been pursuing over the past couple of years, and seems to be ramping up.

Separately, the bank said it was looking for six “full stack” developers for a project “which is changing the way the organisation delivers software”.

“Our team delivers at a fast pace to match the feature pipeline from cloud providers and the changing needs of our application teams,” it said.

“The team are delivering cloud via a fully automated application (developer) driven model. We also work collaboratively with our on-premise infrastructure, operations and application teams.”

Macquarie said its platform “covers a full stack of technologies from networking, storage services and server instances to messaging, mobile platforms and higher level application services".

The developers it is recruiting will work in a “two pizza” team – an approach borrowed from Amazon to describe a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas (the idea being a small team can work more nimbly and with some autonomy to get things done).