Innovation

Bulgarian Team Triumphs with Three First Places at VMware’s Annual Global Hackathon – Borathon

Innovative solution for easy creation, deployment and use of K8s Operators and CRDs impresses judges

What is a Borathon

Borathon is VMware’s internal hackathon — an excellent opportunity for grassroots, employee-driven ideas to come to the forefront. In the spirit of ONE VMware, hackers can hack from anywhere. It is open to all full-time employees, including interns and all functions supporting VMware business, which makes approximately 37000 employees globally. Borathon is a chance to bring innovative ideas to life and an opportunity to network, learn and have fun. The teams have 48 hours to implement their ideas and prepare demonstration videos of their achievements.

This year the internal hackathon was held between the 8th and 10th of June with 200 teams and 700 hackers from different parts of the world. Teams were able to work on one of the three categories listed below:

  • Time to Purchase and Deploy any VMware Service
  • Empower application teams to use multiple clouds via Kubernetes
  • Make VMware Cloud the Top Destination for New Applications and Services

Winning 3 first places

Bulgarian team has won first place in the “Empower application teams to use multiple clouds via Kubernetes” category globally, first place in Bulgaria, and first place in EMEA with their innovative project “NextGen Multi-Cloud Kubernetes Operators Platform”. 

The team members are Angel Yanev, Viktoria Penkova, Milena Atanasova, Pavel Damyanov, Plamen Georgiev, Ihor Herasko, Kristiyan Kalchev, and Zhivko Zapryanov.

“NextGen Multi-Cloud Kubernetes Operators Platform” (MKOP) project

The standard way of creating a k8s workload by creating long Kubernetes manifests comes with a few challenges:

  • Requires a solid knowledge of k8s syntax and k8s objects
  • Requires a long learning curve
  • It takes a long time for implementation
  • Requires additional effort to handle multi-cloud deployment

CRDs and Custom controllers help with these challenges by providing custom resources that allow you to create a complex application deployment in several lines of YAML. However, creating a K8s Operator also requires deep knowledge of k8s, programming experience, and Operator SDK.

MKOP simplifies the creation, deployment, and usage of K8s Operators and CRDs. Some of the main benefits of the solution are:

  • Substitute the long YAML definitions with a simple and interactive UI
  • Doesn’t require k8s, programming, and Operator SDK knowledge
  • Significantly reducing time for implementation, learning, and onboarding
  • Provide standard APIs for integration with 3rd party apps
  • Easily deploy the same application to multiple clouds and ensure consistency

With the help of the MKOP, users can create a new Operator and CRD to deploy and manage their application’s life cycle by just providing a few parameters to the UI. They can also use the provided standard APIs. Then the Backend will generate a new Operator, CRD, and application custom resource object and upload them to a binary repository. The user can download the newly generated YAML files and Docker container or directly deploy them to multiple clouds with just a click of a button, ensuring consistency.

What’s next

In the innovative spirit of VMware, the team will apply for internal sponsorship to continue working on the solution to make it part of the VMware portfolio.

The team has submitted a patent application for the solution they designed during the Global Borathon, which is currently under review.

Great job, team! Keep the same spirit!

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