Google Cloud {Code_Love_Hack} Winners!

When we launched GKE Autopilot in February, we wanted to provide Google Cloud developers with the opportunity to be some of the first to give it a spin and experience the hands-off nodeless Kubernetes experience for themselves. We decided to host a hackathon all surrounded by the theme of spreading love - love of code, love of gaming, love of Kubernetes! Google Cloud’s {Code_Love_Hack} hackathon took place over four weeks with over 650+ developers hacking their way to our $10,000 prize pool. Throughout the hackathon, all participants were tasked with using GKE Autopilot and Cloud Code to create solutions, applications and games in the theme of love. 

GKE Autopilot is a new mode of operation in GKE that manages the entire cluster’s infrastructure, including nodes and node pools. This hands-off Kubernetes experience allows you to focus more on your workloads and pay for only the resources required to run your applications. 

To streamline your Kubernetes development journey, Google Cloud’s official development tool, Cloud Code, has been preconfigured with tools to speed up your Kubernetes development. Cloud Code is our IDE extension that helps you write, deploy and debug your cloud based applications quickly and easily. Cloud Code comes pre-configured with tools to help speed up local development, including Buildpacks, Minikube and Skaffold. It also has tools for debugging on Kubernetes, an explorer where you can visualize, monitor, and view information about your cluster resources without running any CLI commands. 

Below are the creative winners for each of our four challenges and the use cases that incorporate the Cloud Code and GKE Autopilot love:

Challenge #1 - The Next Level of Love

Build a managed service application that makes creating, sharing, debugging or deploying code easier.

Project Title: ARGANIA

Team Member: Fatima Zahra Moussaid

The Issue: Maintaining documentation in agile projects can be tough, especially when using plain text editors. They are difficult to read/update and the structure of documentation can change from one project to another. Additionally, it makes the onboarding of new developers difficult. Developers need a structured and easy way to create documentation and specifications.

The Solution: Argania gives developers documentation templates with a user friendly design so they don’t have to start documentation from scratch for each project. Argania creates documentation in an organized and defined way.

Challenge #2 - For the Love of Gaming

Calling all gamers: as a game developer or a gaming enthusiast, the best way for you to show love is by, of course, creating a game! Show off your skills, to devise a game that shows love, gives love, or simply shows your love of gaming. 

Project Title: Lovely Buzzword Bingo

Team Member: Devin Sit

The Issue: Meetings can be very long and it is easy to zone out. Simply sitting and listening to a meeting about 'innovation', 'best practices', and 'blockchain', is not always the most engaging means of getting information from management. Building an engaging way to stay present in meetings that both increases team synergy while improving the alignment between boss and team was a must.

The Solution: Lovely Buzzword Bingo is the magic solution. The game brings a fun and simple way for teams to engage during meetings that all team members can enjoy: bingo but with buzzwords! Now everyone is more inclined to pay attention during meetings, otherwise you won’t get a bingo. Everyone can just pull it up on their laptop, or another monitor, and play along. Truly, team bonding at its finest.

Challenge #3 - Spreading the Love

We’ve all been disconnected from friends and family for months due to the looming pandemic. What best way to show that you care, love and miss your loved ones by creating something to spread that love? Take on this challenge by creating an application - whether it is a service or a tool - that connects others to their loved ones!

Project Title: सहायता (SAHAYATA)

Team Members: Kshitij Dhara, Siddhant Deshpande, Pranay Phulphagar, Shrihari Jhawar, Aditya Dutta 

The Issue: There are NGOs in our city with so many meaningful missions and events that no one knows about, they require volunteers and funding to run their organization but they don't have a platform to publicize themself. We truly believe that the best way to "Spread The Love" is by giving it back. So that inspired us to do something for the people who are already making our society a better place.

The Solution: We have devised a solution that involves an interface that acts as a mediator helping to connect NGOs with people who want to give back to society. It is a two-tier platform with an NGO tier and a Normal tier. The Normal tier allows people to view, volunteer, and Donate to NGOs, whereas the NGO tier allows NGO admins to edit the NGO profile, create events, contact volunteers, and publicize the NGO.

Challenge #4 - Wildcard and Best use of GKE Autopilot

Do you have a solution that encompasses more than one of the challenges above? Create a unique and useful solution, like a better dating app or a love meter that shows others how much love you have for them!

Project Title: Predict 360

Team Member: Ajay Ganugula, Sahithi Thamatam, Rama Devi, Mrudhula Katta 

The Issue: Quest Motors, a fictional Bikes company, is boggled with the current set-up of AI based prediction of spare parts based on constant real-time IOT Data. The company has huge infrastructure which is active only for 8-10 hours a day, but still not capable of prediction in real-time. The business’ vision of providing real-time recommendations is far-off and the company is looking for a cost optimized solution.

The Solution: AI prediction of bike spares is a custom legacy app developed with ML.Net and ASP.Net. It is now migrated to GKE Autopilot, which gives auto scalability for real-time predictions based on live IOT events. Now the company need not estimate for and plan infrastructure for the future which is 75% unutilized, instead rely on GKE. GKE also integrates web/middleware and other tiers as separate PODs in a single cluster.

It was so great to see how these projects came to life using Cloud Code and GKE Autopilot. We look forward to seeing how our amazing customers continue to use our products to creatively come up with applications and solutions that continue to spread the Google Cloud love. Here is a quote that demonstrate the love of Cloud Code and GKE Autopilot:

Make sure to check out our new reference guide as you begin your journey developing on GKE. It covers every step of your journey from writing, running, operating, to managing code!