Fairwinds Hosts COVID-19 Hackathon; Competition to Create Applications to Address Pandemic

BOSTON, March 31, 2020 (Newswire.com) -  Fairwinds, a Kubernetes enablement company, today announced a joint COVID-19 Hackathon. The program is designed to encourage innovative thinkers to create Kubernetes-based web application ideas to address the pandemic. Fairwinds will work with GitLab, Datadog and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide an end-to-end infrastructure solution to enable the winning project. 

Starting immediately and running through April 10, 2020, people with ideas in the United States can pitch their project proposals for consideration. Proposals can be projects already underway or completely new ideas, though all entries must help address at least one of the following:

• Reduce the Spread of COVID-19
• Find a Cure for the Virus
• Educate the Public on COVID-19
• Rebuild the Economy

Representatives from Fairwinds, AWS, GitLab and Datadog will judge the competition and vote on a solution, which will be announced on April 15, 2020. Application development will be open to the public to start immediately after. Sponsoring companies will provide the following to the winning project as they move from idea to tangible solution:

• AWS will be offering six months of application hosting support*
• GitLab will be where the project lives
• Datadog will be offering free monitoring for six months*
• Fairwinds will be offering free Kubernetes managed services for six months*

* Timeframes may adjust depending on variables of winning project

Project ideas may be submitted immediately by going to the following GitLab link and following the submission directions: http://covidhack.org/. 

Quotes

Bill Ledingham, CEO, Fairwinds 

“While we are not on the front lines fighting COVID-19, we want to do our part to contribute to the common good by finding solutions that make an impact. Working behind the scenes with the tremendous talent and innovation that exists in the engineering and developer community, we are excited to be working with AWS, Datadog and GitLab to provide full infrastructure support to get an idea off the ground, scaling and moving. Our goal is to address the situation in a practical way and give our engineering teams and community a way to contribute.” 

Brandon Jung, VP of Alliances, GitLab

“This pandemic affects people in every corner of the world. Developers that can innovate to find a solution that also impacts those same people is such a valuable opportunity. We’re excited to offer a simple, secure platform to make this project work and look forward to being a part of it.” 

Ilan Rabinovitch, VP Product & Community, Datadog

“Datadog is proud to support our partners and community in their work fighting and responding to COVID-19. We look forward to helping participating projects accelerate their launch and scale with observability best practices and tooling.”

About Fairwinds 

Fairwinds provides a Kubernetes enablement platform for innovative development teams. Offerings include ClusterOps, a 24x7 managed service to extend your team; ClusterOps Advisory to supplement your team’s expertise; and Fairwinds Insights, subscription software providing continuous monitoring for cloud-native infrastructure and workloads. Fairwinds enables organizations to run reliable, scalable, and secure Kubernetes infrastructure.

The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and provides a fully remote and distributed work environment. Visit www.fairwinds.com for more information.

Source: Fairwinds