MTC and IBM: Cloud Services and Modern Applications - It's Easy

Article author: Alexander Klimov, Lead Software Engineer, Member of the IBM Academy of Technology

Recently, a two-day hackathon took place at the IBM Client Center in order to attract developers to search for and develop promising ideas and get acquainted with the platform for developing IBM Bluemix cloud services *.
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The participants needed to organize themselves into teams, come up with an idea, develop a project and present it to the jury of the hackathon, which consisted of representatives of the organizing companies - MTS and IBM. The jury voted to determine the winners, whose ideas and projects, both from a technical and business point of view, turned out to be the most interesting and convincing. The owners of the first three places received cash prizes and an unforgettable experience of night debugging and the presentation of their applications after a sleepless night.

In total, over 70 people took part in the hackathon, which organized 12 teams and submitted 11 projects.

Teams, projects and technologies

Among the projects presented were many truly creative ideas and technological solutions, and the jury found it difficult to choose the best. As a result, the following three projects of the winning teams were selected.

Spreading (Best Project nomination)

The project of the team from MTS, who invented and developed Telegram Bot, which, using the cognitive computing paradigm, provides the user with convenient control over their expenses, integration with popular social networks and MTS services. One of the advantages of the project is the absence of the need to install a new application, since an existing platform, Telegram, with a dynamic ecosystem of developers was used.

Fraud Detector (Big Data nomination)

The project was also developed by the MTS team, its main conceptual idea is to solve actual problems in the field of security and telephone fraud. The team developed an Android application that worked in conjunction with a back-end service deployed in Bluemix Java Instant Runtime. Were designed and implemented the logic of search and identification of attackers using information about calls from open sources of data on telephone frauds and methods of predictive analysis to identify previously unknown behavior patterns of attackers.

AutoBat (Original nomination)

The idea of ​​the project is sending messages to a mobile phone by car number. The project addresses a number of problems that we often encounter in the city, for example, cases when someone's car blocks exit, while taking care of the privacy of users - without disclosing relevant phones. The MTS team that proposed this idea used Bluemix Node-RED service, which, through visual prototyping, greatly simplifies and accelerates the development of cloud applications and IoT services. Bluemix Watson Dialog has helped extend the functionality of the elements of artificial intelligence for automated communication between users and machines.

I would also like to mention the EcoMAP project, which has set a serious and ambitious goal of improving the city’s ecosystem with the help of artificial intelligence. The idea of ​​the project: a user photographs an object, the Bluemix Watson Image Recognition service recognizes this object and contacts a special database to identify the material from which this item was made to provide the nearest disposal address for this item. This helps to reduce the degree of pollution in the city and improve the ecological situation.

In general, all participating teams used two approaches in the design and development of their applications - Bluemix Instant Runtimes (IR) and Bluemix Node-RED.

Bluemix Instant Runtimes is a classic approach in PaaS systems that provides ready-to-use development environments for developers, freeing them from the need for installation, configuration and administration. Bluemix IR's most popular are Java, Python, NodeJS, Go, and Ruby On Rails.

The second approach, Bluemix Node-RED, greatly accelerates the development of applications, since it does not require serious skills in programming languages ​​and allows you to visually simulate the operation of the application, leaving the generation and deployment of code for Bluemix.

Some teams actively used Bluemix Spark, more precisely Spark-as-a-Service, for projects whose ideas were either built around the Big Data paradigm, or somehow operated on similar volumes of data that they stored in Bluemix Object Storage (IBM Spectrum, previously called GPFS).

Bluemix provides the opportunity to work with Docker containers - IBM Containers service, which also helped several teams solve a number of tasks, for example, developing a scheduler service for Spark in a container.

Introspectives: Clouds and Developers

In two days of intense brainstorming, development and testing, all the teams were able to make their way from the idea to the functioning prototype, and this is an impressive result. Especially, given that some ideas have attracted attention with their demand, technological highlights and motivation of the presenting teams to move on.

IBM Bluemix allowed to realize their ideas quickly, without requiring any serious investment in training, if only because it provides a wide range of open source technologies that many of us know — Java, Python, NodeJS, Containers, etc. Moreover, with IBM Watson there are opportunities to create new so-called cognitive systems - systems built on the principles of artificial intelligence.

Of course, we can say that such systems already existed in one form or another, but the possibilities of integration with similar services with elements of artificial intelligence, which IBM Bluemix provides, make it possible to significantly simplify and rethink the architecture of applications.

* Bluemix is ​​a Platform-as-a-Service based on the popular Cloud Foundry open source platform with an extensive range of services that allow you to quickly and conveniently create a wide range of applications. The catalog of services available for developers provides ample opportunities for creating such modern systems as cognitive analytics, mobile applications, scalable hybrid cloud systems, Internet of Things and much more. You can view the service here .