Translated and compiled by Yuan-ling Liang

From March 18 to 20, OpenStack, a cloud operating system built by NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and Rackspace, a managed cloud computing company, is holding its first application hackathon in Taiwan.

OpenStack has become the most popular cloud computing software in recent years. By allowing users to create their private or public clouds, OpenStack has been quite successful in operating the computing platform. Big companies such as Google, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell and Walmart are either users or developers of OpenStack. Its users have reached 37,000 people so far, with one-fourth of them residing in Asia.

OpenStack says Taiwan is the best location for holding a hackathon

In Taiwan, there are more than 1,800 OpenStack users, ranking 15 in the world. The ITRT (The Industrial Technology Research Institute), Quanta Computer, Chunghwa Telecom, Foxconn Technology Group and the 104 Job Bank all use OpenStack as their cloud operation system.

Tom Fifield, community manager of OpenStack, says, “Taiwan is the best place for holding a hackathon.” He explains that the IT industry has been evolving from hardware to hardware-software integration and Taiwan’s plenty of engineers and creative workers provide the global market with an abundant resource of skilled people. Many foreign software companies are outsourcing their cases to Taiwan, including several Japanese mobile game businesses.

Other than that, government investment and the entire IT industry in Taiwan gives much support to OpenStack. The scale of coherent summits in Taiwan is even the largest among the globe.

Michael Jenkins, consultant of Taiwan’s Application Hackathon, says, “Taiwan really has potential in developing cloud computing systems. We anticipate to accelerate Taiwan startups’ developing pace and expand the market.”

Fifield also mentions, “After the announcement of our hackathon in Taiwan, we’ve received emails from communities in Sweden, Brazil, and the US. All of these countries are hoping to have hackathons in their countries. We hope the experience in Taiwan this March can serve as a model for future events abroad. Therefore, we will also upload all of our activity data and make them public as reference to people in other countries.”

The upcoming hackathon in Taiwan

The first OpenStack hackathon will be held in New Taipei City and will last three days. Computer programmers, software and hardware developers or even people interested in developing the systems can all enroll as competitors in the hackathon.

The topic of this year’s competition is “Future City.” Participants are required to come up with a project to transportation and climate issues. Winners will be granted a trip to Austin, Texas, to attend the OpenStack Summit in April, with free plane tickets and accommodation.

Two days of workshop and team-finding activities have already started. The competition will officially start tomorrow night.

Learn more about the event here.

Edited by Olivia Yang

Sources:
Business Next
iThome
UDN