Over the last couple of years the OpenShift team at Red Hat has been hard at work developing the next generation of their application platform. The team recently announced the launch of the OpenShift Online Next Generation (based on OpenShift 3) platform as part of a developer preview. OpenShift Online Next Gen delivers a fully featured container application platform using native docker containers and orchestration via the kubernetes project. For more information about the launch of OpenShift Online Next Generation and for getting started guides, read the FAQ.
To celebrate the launch of the OpenShift Online Next Gen platform, the OpenShift team and the Red Hat Developer program have joined forces to host a competition for creating great applications on the platform. You can think of this competition as an online hackathon with cash and prizes totaling $150,000 USD.
Why did we decide to host an online hackathon?
As part of my role as a Developer Advocate, I have participated in (coded), hosted, been a judge, and mentored at countless in person hackathons. These hackathons typically start on Friday and end Sunday afternoon. During my travels I was able to meet some great coders and learned both the good and bad parts of having a hackathon in person. I love the concept of these hackathons and wanted to open up a larger competition that anyone could participate in without having to worry about travel to compete in person.
Having the hackathon in an online format will allow developers ample time to engage with the platform and bring their best ideas to fruition as the competition will last for 12 weeks.
What types of apps are we looking for?
We had numerous theme ideas for the hackathon but in the end, we decided to make it health related. We felt this was a broad enough category that will allow developers to be creative in developing applications for both physical and mental health. You could even pass off a social beer drinking application as being good for your mental health.
But really, why are we doing this?
We truly feel that OpenShift Online Next Gen is a great platform for developers to take advantage of modern cloud computing and containerization without having to know the details of writing Dockerfiles, running docker builds, pushing images to a registry, creating load balancers, etc. etc. This hackathon will demonstrate to the developer how quickly they can take a git repository and have it running on the public cloud as a docker containers in minutes.
What are you waiting for? Sign up now for the hackathon and get your exclusive access to the OpenShift Online Next Gen hackathon environment! Learn more at the official hackathon site.
Not interested in the hackathon, no problem - you can still use OpenShift Online Dev Preview by signing up at https://www.openshift.com/devpreview/register.html
Last updated: March 15, 2023
