Building Applications with NFS at DeveloperWeek San Francisco
Sunday, March 4, 2018
Most people on a normal weekend don’t pull an all-nighter writing code. Especially when that code is in response to a challenge to create an application that incorporates technology from hackathon sponsors. For over 800 developers, that’s exactly what they did at the DeveloperWeek Hackathon San Francisco. Billed as the nation’s largest challenge-driven hackathon, over 100 teams competed to win prizes and be recognized by their peers as the top application developers.
As a featured sponsor, NetApp once again led the contest with well over 20 teams accepting our challenge to build creative and innovative applications using NetApp’s Cloud Volumes for AWS, a new cloud service that delivers more predictable performance over traditional cloud NFS options. Since consuming Cloud Volumes is straightforward, many of the team’ questions revolved around how they can take advantage of all the cloud volume features to distinguish their application over the competition.
Once again, NetApp was thrilled with the submission. “The quality and ingenuity of the teams was the strongest we’ve ever seen”, remarked Saleem Mohamed – Senior Cloud Evangelist for NetApp. “Ranking the winners came down to single point differences with each of the winners really impressing the judging panel.”
Taking first place in this year’s DeveloperWeek NetApp challenge was team MedSync. Focused on improving doctor / patient information and communications, MedSync automated and integrated the transcription and processing of medical records into a fully integrated and patient available system. Taking advantage of the Express framework for Node.js, MedSync was able to incorporate AWS Lambda, Docker containers, and NetApp cloud volumes into their design and demonstrated an impressive working prototype. Ken Lee, NetApp Data Protection & Migration Services manager remarked “MedSyncs command and incorporation of the technology distinguished them as the challenge winner.”
Tacking the challenge of an on-demand smart trash pickup earned team Garbage Collection (GC) a strong second place prize. Utilizing the features of NetApp Cloud Volumes to mount, clone and connect to an SCM build process, team GC was able to validate data migrations, perform data algorithm tests including validation of processing and execution times, and build a machine learning model for training and evaluation of their garbage collection application. Nikash Narendra of team GC remarked that “this capability extends Gitlab’s build and test tool to a full-fledge CI that required for current data drven systems.”
Achieving third place in the hackathon by combining Google connection with Alexa voice integration to simplify Kubernetes deployment, monitoring and scaling was team Captain Flint. One of the key components of their solution was the challenge of persistent volumes on containers, a feature that has been addressed in the release of NetApp Docker Volume Plugin (nDVP). “Integration of these key components distinguished team Captain Flint above their peers” remarked Ram Kodialbail, storage administrator for NetApp. “Their application marks another evolution of the deployment of containers in the data center.”
This year marked the 4th year of NetApp’s participation in the DeveloperWeek hackathon series. Each year brings stronger competition and this year was our most difficult competition to judge. In addition to the winners, we gave out 9 honorable mention prizes for teams that created truly impressive applications utilizing NetApp Cloud Volumes as a part of their solution.
Turn your technology stack into rocket fuel for innovation: NetApp® Cloud Volumes for Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers enterprise-class performance and capabilities to your cloud applications. Our native cloud service enables analytics, DevOps, enterprise applications, backup, and disaster recovery. Discover more at the NetApp Cloud Volumes webpage.