A New Intuit Open Source Release: Octoductor

Intuit technologists Henry Venturelli, William Weatherspoon, Caio Soares, Sumanth Venkatasubbaiah, and former teammate Frank Wisniewski are excited to launch Octoductor, an application to standardize and consolidate engineering excellence checks across an organization.

The creators of Octoductor sought a way to systematically measure and gauge engineering readiness, helping ensure Intuit products are reliable, consistent, and dependable. They built Octoductor as a core guardrail for engineering practices, providing crucial understanding of what it means for code to be production-ready. The core component of Octoductor is the ability to orchestrate workflows for requirement checks by implementing a framework to automate the capture and tracking of requirements. “We put the developer at the center of our solution,” the team says, “by integrating directly into GitHub, which is the bread and butter of developers’ day-to-day workflow.”

Octoductor is made up mainly of a Cloud Development Kit (CDK) stack that automates AWS infrastructure deployment to automatically orchestrate execution of engineering quality checks by listening to GitHub events. This is a novel application of CDK, which is a new framework offered by AWS. Octoductor includes an interface that makes it easy for contributors to add checks to the framework.

In order to scale, Octoductor needs to include a wider variety of checks; currently, the Octoductor team is adding them manually. Because the world of checks is vast, they’re hoping the open source community can help add checks for a variety of use cases. In turn, the team hopes others can leverage the generic infrastructure and orchestration framework of Octoductor to cover their own use cases and automate their checks.