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

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

Recently, a two-day hackathon was held at the IBM Client Center to attract developers to search and develop promising ideas and familiarize themselves with the platform for developing IBM Bluemix * cloud services .

Participants needed to organize in 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 determined the winners by voting, whose ideas and projects, both from a technical and a 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 nightly debugging and presenting their applications after a sleepless night.

In total, more than 70 people took part in the hackathon, who organized 12 teams and presented 11 projects.

Teams, projects and technologies

Among the presented projects there were many truly creative ideas and technological solutions, and the jury was not easy to choose the best. As a result, the following three projects of the winning teams were selected.

Prostorobot (Best Project nomination) A

project from the MTS team that invented and developed the Telegram Bot, which, using the cognitive computing paradigm, provides the user with convenient control over their expenses, integration with popular MTS social networks and services. One of the advantages of the project is the absence of the need to install a new application, as the 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 pressing problems in the field of security and telephone fraud. The team developed an Android application that worked in conjunction with the back-end service deployed in Bluemix Java Instant Runtime. The logic for searching and identifying malefactors was designed and implemented using call information from open sources of telephone fraud data and predictive analysis techniques to identify previously unknown behavioral patterns of malefactors.

Auto (nomination Original)

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 the exit, while taking care of user privacy - without revealing the actual phones. The MTS team that proposed this idea used Bluemix Node-RED, a service that, through visual prototyping, significantly simplifies and speeds up the development of cloud applications and IoT services. The Bluemix Watson Dialog service helped expand the functionality with artificial intelligence elements for automated communication between users and machines.

I would also like to mention the EcoMAP project, which has set a serious and ambitious goal to improve the ecosystem of the city with the help of artificial intelligence. Project idea: the user takes a picture of an object, the Bluemix Watson Image Recognition service recognizes this object and contacts a special database to identify the material from which this item is made to provide the closest disposal address for this item. This allows you to reduce the degree of environmental 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 to PaaS systems that provides ready-to-use environments for developers, freeing them from the need to install, configure and administer. The most popular Bluemix IRs are Java, Python, NodeJS, Go, and Ruby On Rails.

The second approach, Bluemix Node-RED, significantly speeds up application development, as it does not require serious programming language skills and allows you to visually simulate the application, leaving the generation and deployment of code for Bluemix.

Some teams actively used Bluemix Spark, or rather 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 ability to work with Docker containers - the IBM Containers service, which also helped several teams solve a number of tasks, for example, developing a scheduler service for Spark in a container.

Introspective: clouds and developers

In two days of intensive brainstorms, development and testing, all teams were able to go from an idea to a functioning prototype, and this is an impressive result. Especially, considering that some ideas attracted attention due to their relevance, technological highlights and motivation of the presenting teams to move on.

IBM Bluemix allowed you to realize your ideas quickly, without requiring any major investment in training, if only because it provides a wide selection of open source technologies that many of us are familiar with - 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 the artificial intelligence elements that IBM Bluemix provides can significantly simplify and rethink the application architecture.

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